Prostitution Archives - Julia O'Malley

From trafficked to trafficker: youth homelessness and sexual exploitation in Alaska (For The Guardian)

Julia O'Malley — Mon, 22 May 2017 18:11:21 +0000

(This story is part of a larger project by The Guardian that looks at homelessness in the western United States. Ash Adams made the photos. )

Heidi Ross was a senior in high school when she hitchhiked from the Anchorage suburb of Eagle River into the city, leaving a dark childhood behind.

“I didn’t have anywhere to go,” she said of that day, around 20 years ago. “I had the clothes on my back.”

After she arrived, without a way to pay rent, she soon found herself trading sex for a place to stay. Next she traded sex for drugs. Using sex to get things she needed made her feel powerful, she said. At 21, she went to work for a pimp who promised to take care of her.

“It felt strange at first, because I was so used to taking care of myself,” she said. “It felt good. It felt like a piece was missing and it had finally come back.”

Ross said sex work became her “lifestyle”. Eventually, however, she would be the one exploiting young men and women as adrift as she was on that ride into Anchorage.

Sexual exploitation has been an undercurrent of the state’s male-dominated frontier culture since Russian explorers first came to the region, and men flocked to the state during the Gold Rush. Law enforcement, prosecutors and victim advocates have long suspected the state has a high rate of sex trafficking, but the problem has been largely unstudied. Recently, though, a small study of trafficking among homeless youth offered some data to support these suspicions.

Read the rest here.

ANCHORAGE, ALAKSA – MAY 6, 2017: “I’ve never had a tattoo done professionally,” Heidi Ross says. They were all done on the streets or in prison, she explains. This one, which reads “For the Love of It” with two money symbols, was done partially on the street and partially in prison. It references both the love of money but also the love of life as a sex worker. Ross got the first part of the tattoo when she was 24 and running her own escort service, and then the dollar signs while in prison. Ross was trafficked at a young age and then eventually ran her own trafficking business, but after almost 2 decades and 36 arrests, she says she’s done, changing her name, and going to school, ready to start a new life with her 7-year-old son./ASH ADAMS

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For ADN: The sex trafficking trial of Troy Williams

Julia O'Malley — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 06:35:38 +0000

I’m interested in doing deeper coverage of sex trafficking in Alaska, in part because this state shares demographic characteristics with other places in the United States, like North Dakota, with high numbers of women involved in trafficking.

I’ve been following several sex trafficking cases, including the case of Troy Williams that went to a jury last week. He was accused of recruiting, torturing and forcing mostly young Alaska Native women in to sex work. Ash Adams and I visited the courtroom as the trial closed.

Here’s the beginning of our story for Alaska Dispatch News:

As he ran his sex trafficking ring over the years, Troy Williams always recruited the same kind of girls, assistant attorney general Adam Alexander told a jury Wednesday, as he gave his closing argument in Williams’ trial.

They were older teenagers, mostly Alaska Native, he said. They had rough childhoods in villages or elsewhere. Some were addicts. And, he said, they were usually broke.

At first, Williams was like Prince Charming, Alexander said. He met wayward teenagers and promised them a fresh start. He bought the young women things and gave them a place to live.

“He was a very talented man, and sometimes very charming,” Alexander said.

But then he got controlling, like “a strict dad,” Alexander said. Eventually, he told them they had to have sex for money and give him the proceeds, he said. And with those who challenged him, Williams got violent, beating or torturing one in view of the others to reinforce his power, the prosecutor said.

A jury will now decide whether Williams, 49, is guilty of eight counts of felony sex trafficking for operating a prostitution ring from 2004 to 2011. Investigators said that he and a woman, Heidi Ross, forced women to have sex for money under threat of violence.

Ross, who faced fewer charges, pleaded guilty and has completed her jail sentence. At the time they were charged, their crime was called “promoting prostitution.” The wording of the statute has since been changed to call the crime “sex trafficking.”

Read the rest here. (He was found guilty on some of the charges.)

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For ADN: A look at prostitution in Anchorage from someone who lived it

Julia O'Malley — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 17:52:56 +0000

In today’s ADN:

The first time Amber Batts traded sex for money, she said, she was 30. She had two small children, her husband at the time was hurt at work, she said, and they needed money. She answered a newspaper ad and soon found herself at a trailer in view of the giant neon tattoo shop gun in Spenard. She knocked on the door. A man ushered her inside.

He gave her the rundown: always get the money up front; don’t do anything extra without a condom; don’t do anything that doesn’t feel safe; let somebody else know where you are. She sat on a couch and watched women come and go. Her “date” arrived, a white guy in his 50s. He wore glasses and worked an office job. He was nice, she said. Afterward she felt no emotion. She was numb.

“It was really easy. It was too easy,” she said. “I made about $300 of my own that night.”

Find the rest of the story here.

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