Preventing and Responding to Sexual Exploitation, Violence, and Harassment with Rev. Bonnie Gatchell

Sexual exploitation is becoming a well-known issue. Rape and sexual assault cases in our society are rising at an alarming rate, and to combat such crimes, we must encourage people to increase awareness and concern, particularly among women. What will it take to end exploitation in the sex industry? In this week's episode of Action Antidote, Rev. Bonnie Gatchell joins us to enlighten us and provide hope to those women trapped in the snares of exploitation, as well as to raise awareness of the issue. Rev. Bonnie Gatchell is the Director and Co-Founder of Route One Ministry, a ministry that serves women who have been sexually abused by the sex industry. Her mission is to provide the church with a theological framework as well as practical means to better serve, receive, and care for women who have experienced domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, and gender-based violence in all of its forms. Tune in to this episode to find more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Preventing and Responding to Sexual Exploitation, Violence, and Harassment with Rev. Bonnie Gatchell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the problems that keeps a lot of people settling for less and less than what they really want and really deserve out of life is this feeling of disempowerment, and disempowerment can come in so many different forms we can identify it in our own lives and we can identify in others. My guest today, Bonnie Gatchell, has found a way to not only empower herself to solve some of our biggest problems but also empower some others that are really, really in need, really in a place of some genuine disempowerment with her organization, Route One Ministry. --- Bonnie, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, Stephen. I appreciate you having me. Yeah, I really appreciate you coming on. So, Route One Ministries, you help women who were tricked into the sex industry. Can you please explain to us, first of all, how it is that this happens to the people that it ends up happening to? That’s a great question and I even like the wording that you used with “tricks,” kind of the quotes around it. So I think the misunderstanding about women who are working in the sex industry, maybe strip clubs or in prostitution, I think particularly around strip clubs and then maybe even pornography is this belief that they choose to be there or there’s a lot of freedom in being there, that they are sufficiently financially backed up by being there, supplying for, but the truth is, the average age of entry here in the United States is 12 years old. Oh, wow. Yeah. I think that’s a great response that you said, “Oh, wow,” and I think a lot of people don’t realize that. I think the other thing for Route One, when we think about women being sexually exploited, I think no little girl wants to be a stripper when she grows up so if we think from that premise, no little girl wants to be a stripper when she grows up or a woman in prostitution, then we have to ask the question what has brought this woman here, and there’s a lot of different reasons for each woman but the biggest driving factor is some source of poverty. Maybe it’s financial poverty or emotional poverty or spiritual poverty, I think a lack of education, so some kind of brokenness that has happened in their life, trauma that has happened in their life that has brought them to a place of being exploited. And I think, directly, some women have even been manipulated through force, fraud, or coercion, and then forced to work in the strip clubs and they’re given a fake name and a fake identity and fake background story for the sake of their clients and to protect the men and women who are essentially pimping them out and trafficking them. So, you said the average age of entry is 12 years old. What is a genuine story or a typical story of a 12-year-old? Because, I don’t know, that just seems really bizarre to me, in essence, and no one really can make that good of decisions for the rest of their lives when they’re 12. Right, exactly, Stephen. Exactly. You’ve hit the nail on the head that’s important for people to realize. So, unfortunately, a pretty classic story is a lot of women are pimped out or trafficked by someone in their family or in their community. So, I think, on average, the Department of Justice would say that women from inner city backgrounds or urban backgrounds are actually trafficked by a mom, dad, or stepdad. That’s a pretty big, alarming thing to think about. So, for us, for example, I have a woman, we’ll call her Sally, just for the sake of it’s not my story to tell, and we first met her when she was 21 years old and she was working in prostitution and she had already been working in prostitution for some time and when we talked with her and I heard more about her story, how she doesn’t keep the money at night, it goes to this boyfriend of hers who’s a friend of the family, I said to her, “Oh, you’ve been trafficked,” and she said, “No, I haven’t been trafficked. That’s not what this is. This is just what my family does.” And then she went on to tell me months later, after we got to it more than when she was 13, her mom said, “Hey, you know, pack your bags, we’re gonna go on a vacation,” and she was super excited because they had never been on a vacation as a family. This is in Boston, Mass. They drove to another city that’s about an hour and a half outside of Boston, they got a hotel, and mom said, “I’ll be right back, I’m gonna go get ice from the machine,” and when mom was gone, this man came in and raped this 13-year-old girl and, at the end of the day, more men came into the room and so it wasn’t accidental, it’s her mom who had set that up. And so, from there, now, this 13-year-old is trapped in a place of a place of prostitution, including working in the strip clubs. You often talk about this connection between the sex industry and strip clubs and I’ve always thought of the strip club as just a place where a bunch of guys throw out dollars and these women are dancing. I never thought of anything beyond that, any connection to something, I guess, quite a bit shadier than that, to be honest. Yeah. And, again, I appreciate you bringing that up because that is exactly the story that we’ve been told about strip clubs and it’s exactly what I thought about strip clubs before I got into this work and about women who work there, I assumed that they were college girls just making their way through college or maybe a single mom who needed money to put on the table. But, for me, my story in this work as the founder and director of Route One Ministry started through Christmas baskets and the question was asked, how do we reach women sexually exploited here in Boston, here in the United States, and the answer was given to make baskets and to take it to strippers working on Christmas Eve. And so that resonated with me. We made baskets, together with my church, we made baskets, and I called up a strip club manager and I asked if we could bring them and we did. And when we met the women, the women who worked there had tears in their eyes, they said that this was the only gift they would get that year, they asked for hugs, and so, for me, I realized there was something bigger going on then what I originally thought was happening. And so, long story short, I began to dig around to see how I could connect with women who worked in the clubs on a regular basis and I found an organization in Kentucky, I drove to Kentucky, I went into my first strip club with this organization and I met my first stripper and she was 62 years old and still stripping. Oh, wow. Yep, yeah. And she looked 62. She had crow’s feet and C-section scars and so I think, for me, in meeting this woman, this grandmother, I realized that this woman didn’t intend for this to be her life’s work. There was something else keeping her there and she never made the money she needed to escape. So the truth is, women are often spit on in the clubs, they have beer thrown on them. Like we said, the average age of entry is 12. There’s a lot of 14, 15, 16 year olds working in strip clubs with fake IDs, not of their own being there, it’s someone else, a boyfriend or a parent or a trafficker who’s forcing them to be there. Lots of people don’t know that they have to pay to walk through the front door so the women actually pay, like in Boston, the downtown clubs charge $75 just to walk through the front door, the women pay that, right? Yeah, to get in and then they get the tip, the money for the lap dances and all that. Yeah. And so they usually don’t make back that money. If there are 8 to 12 women in the strip club and there’s only 6 to 10 clients, like what is the likelihood they’re going to make that money back? And so now they’re in debt and they’re in debt to these strip club managers. 90 percent of women who work in the sex industry have been sexually abused before they turned 18. 70 percent of women who work in the strip clubs are girls who have aged out of the foster care system with just not a direction to go, no high school degree. Yeah, I think those are some pretty alarming statistics and there’s others I could share with you but I think that that helps paint a better picture, a more true picture about what happens in the strip clubs. And so how did you come to the realization about the extent of this problem? Because you mentioned, just like how I was thinking, okay, it’s just this place where people go have fun, drink a little, and the club’s exploit the customers’ whatever pent-up sexual energy, the things that people usually think of, but then like understanding that, like is this something that you had an inkling of one thing when you were starting? Is this something you learned as you went along?...