Fifteen-year-old Tricia Grant was chatting with a girlfriend during dinner in a popular restaurant in Auburn, Maine. In her young life, Tricia had experienced hardships no child should suffer: sexual violence, housing insecurity, exposure to drugs and domestic abuse. She was also the mother of a one-year-old boy. Above all, Tricia confided in her friend, she feared losing her baby.\u00a0<\/p>\n Tricia Grant <\/em> <\/p>\n Two men eavesdropping on the conversation approached the girls and offered them a way to earn money. Excited by this potential lifeline, the girls showed up at the given address the following evening. That night, the men raped Tricia and her friend, put a pager in Tricia\u2019s hands, and immediately began selling the girls to sex buyers in Maine and throughout New England. Her friend is still missing.<\/p>\n \u201cThe pager would go off and I knew it meant that I would be brought either to a strip club, a hotel room, a truck stop, or a house party. Never once was I asked how old I was, or if I needed help,\u201d said\u00a0Grant, now 44 years old, and the executive director of the survivor-led organization\u00a0Just Love Worldwide<\/a>. \u201cI didn\u2019t know there was a name for what was done to me or that it wasn\u2019t my fault, so I never told anybody.\u201d<\/p>\n Maine State Representative of South Portland\u00a0Lois Galgay Reckitt<\/a>\u00a0understands all too well these intractable patterns of male violence against women, abuse of power, stigma, and shame. A long-time feminist advocate, Galgay Reckitt co-founded the Maine Women\u2019s Lobby in the 1970s and lobbied for the passage of Maine\u2019s first civil rights law for the\u00a0LGBTQ<\/a>\u00a0community.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lois Galgay Reckitt and Governor Janet Mills<\/em><\/p>\n Bearing witness to Tricia\u2019s story and in collaboration with dozens of other survivors in Maine, Rep. Galgay Reckitt spearheaded a multi-year, bi-partisan campaign to educate her colleagues about the impact of prostitution and how its pieces fit with the puzzles of\u00a0intimate partner abuse, sexual harassment, and sexual violence. The exchange of money for these cruelties, they advocated, did not add up to consent.\u00a0<\/p>\n Legalizing or decriminalizing the sex trade, as\u00a0some<\/a>\u00a0were proposing as a solution, would only expand the market of sexual exploitation under the economic laws of supply, demand, and revenues for the sex trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n Pimps and traffickers rely on a vibrant demand of sex buyers to fill their coffers and \u2013 similar to pigs\u2019 exceptional sense of smell in unearthing rare truffles \u2013 they can instantly sniff out a person\u2019s vulnerabilities and exploit them. When the state legalizes or decriminalizes the sex trade, third-party profiteers and\u00a0traffickers<\/a> multiply auction blocks, in the style of brothels, illicit \u201cmassage parlors\u201d and other commercial sex establishments, to deliver their prey.\u00a0<\/p>\n Maine had to find a better solution. Thanks to the advocacy of survivors like Grant and allies like Rep. Galgay Reckitt \u2013 they did.\u00a0<\/p>\n On June 26, 2023,\u00a0\u00a0Governor Janet Mills signed An\u00a0Act<\/a>\u00a0to Reduce Commercial Sexual Exploitation, eliminating the crime of engaging in prostitution and maintaining penalties for patronizing. The law ends the arrests and incarceration solely of people bought and sold in prostitution while still holding their sex buyers and other perpetrators accountable for the grievous harm they cause.\u00a0<\/p>\n Two weeks later, An\u00a0Act<\/a>\u00a0to Provide Remedies for Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation followed suit. A services component to the law, the law mandates the state to offer comprehensive services survivors need to help them rebuild their lives. It also seals records of prostitution convictions so survivors can forge their future without fear of discrimination in housing or employment, for example.<\/p>\n With these Acts, Maine became the first state in the nation to adopt a legal framework known as the Equality Model, also called the Nordic or Abolitionist Model. Enacted in\u00a0eight<\/a>\u00a0countries around the world, including Sweden, France, Canada and Israel, the law recognizes the system of prostitution as a barrier to equality.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n The\u00a0Patriarchs<\/a>\u00a0sculpted the system of prostitution from their bedrock to exert dominance over women and feminized bodies in worlds that valued neither. Conquerors exported it across continents and seas to secure the desecration of Indigenous and African women that still permeates\u00a0today<\/a>. It cannot exist without sex buyers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Survivors of prostitution report that\u00a0sex buyers<\/a>\u00a0are often more brutal than pimps. The patronizers\u2019 sense of entitlement coupled with the power of their money hand them a license to humiliate, maim, torture, leave for dead, or worse.\u00a0<\/p>\n Farmer and habitual sex buyer Robert Pickton, known as\u00a0The Butcher<\/a>, murdered 49 prostituted women.\u00a0\u00a0Another sex buyer,\u00a0\u201cGreen River Killer<\/a>\u201d\u00a0Gary Leon Ridgway, a commercial truck painter, killed 48 women.\u00a0And now in New York, investigations are underway linking architect and chronic sex buyer Rex Heuermann to the\u00a0Gilgo Beach<\/a>\u00a0murders of sex trafficked and prostituted women. Among them was Maine native\u00a0Megan Waterman<\/a>, pimped by her\u00a0boyfriend<\/a>\u00a0and sold to Heuermann who allegedly dumped her\u00a0body<\/a>\u00a0on the north side of\u00a0Ocean Parkway<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n In each of these and\u00a0other<\/a>\u00a0serial killer cases linked to prostitution, the blueprints are similar: next-door neighbors consumed with hatred for women and who rely on law enforcement\u2019s stubborn indifference to both holding\u00a0patronizers<\/a>\u00a0accountable and to the suffering of the prostituted. The Gilgo Beach tragedy shows that if New York were committed to apprehending\u00a0sex buyers<\/a>, lives could have been saved.<\/p>\n The Equality Model calls on us to change our deep-seated cultural beliefs that prostitution is either inevitable, or \u201cwork,\u201d or punishment for the forsaken children who should have known better. Implementation is not easy; it requires both financial investments and political will.\u00a0<\/p>\n But it can be done. Since enacting its law in 2016,\u00a0France<\/a>\u00a0has increased prosecutions against pimps and traffickers by\u00a054%<\/a>, and fined close to 10,000 sex buyers using those revenues to fund\u00a0\u00a0comprehensive, trauma-informed\u00a0services<\/a>\u00a0to hundreds of people in the sex trade, mostly women of color.\u00a0<\/p>\n The law requires an understanding that purchasing sexual acts is not a harmless pastime for lonely men or a way to feed uncontrollable sexual urges, but rather is a practice of\u00a0gender-based violence<\/a>, often laced with racism, and always with misogyny and dehumanization.\u00a0<\/p>\n Rep. Galgay Reckitt knows these truths in her bones from her pioneering days fighting domestic abuse and sexual violence. The call to action is the same: don\u2019t look away, don\u2019t make excuses, don\u2019t ask whether anyone chose it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Instead, ask who is suffering and why, who is causing the harm, and who is profiting from the multi-billion-dollar sex trade with impunity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a lot of work ahead of us,\u201d said Grant. \u201cBut I\u2019m so proud that\u00a0Maine is the first state to listen to survivors and to understand that we too are deserving of justice and a life free from violence. Not just us, but the generations to come.\u201d<\/p>\n Author: Taina Bien-Aim\u00e9 is Executive Director, Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/150091407.v2.pressablecdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/Tricia-Grant-1.jpg\")
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