#117 Jewell Baraka: Surviving Life in a Child Brothel
Jewell Baraka from Exodus Cry was trafficked in a child brothel. Now she is a survivor leader.
““Many people say that porn is filmed prostitution, but it is much worse. If porn were filmed prostitution, you would be there with a camera and one client... In porn gang rape is [the] norm. Also, I would usually have sex with everyone on the set”.”
Listen here (Transcript Below):
Luba Fein interviews Jewell Baraka, a writer, an activist, and a survivor who was trafficked into prostitution and the pornography industry from age 11-17, in Portland, Oregon, USA. Now, Jewell uses her voice, alongside other survivors and activists to shine a light on the human rights violations in the sex industry.
This episode is part of our #ListenToSurvivors podcast series.
Transcript:
Luba Fein from FiLiA in conversation with Jewell.
L – Could you share your story with us?
J – I’d be happy to. I was trafficked from the age of 11 – 17 in Portland Oregon. I was trafficked by my father for the first 3 years, from 11 – 14. I was trafficked in an underage brothel, the Warehouse. At 14 I was trafficked into the porn industry. It was a paedophile alone in an apartment filming me.
I was on a film set in a huge studio and all others on the set were adults. I categorised it as the professional underground. It was a professional set up but clearly not reporting taxes to the government, so underground. I was exploited in porn for 3 years.
That’s an overview of my story.
L – At the age of 17, how did you manage to exit? Did anyone help you?
J – No-one helped me. Since my dad was trafficking me, there really wasn’t anybody helping me during my trauma. After 3 years of exploitation in porn that included every form of rape and violence, gang rape, humiliation and torture in film that they could think of. I think they were just done with me and on to the next girl. Porn is always looking for the next thing, the next escalation of pain. The nice girl to build up and rip apart. I don’t know what they were thinking, they were just done with me. They had done everything they could think of to me and they wanted somebody else.
At 17 I was still living at home with my father so there was still him to escape. But that’s how I got out of the porn industry. They were done with me. They filmed a couple of scenes, retired my character and that was it. They had done 4 or 5 films with me.
L – So at 17 you stayed at your parents’ home?
J – I had to figure out how to get out of there. It took me another year. My dad was a sociopath, very controlling. I just had to find the right way to get away from him. The way I did it was go to college far away from that and from there I started breaking ties with them. I just had to do it right because he’s a very dangerous man.
L – No-one helped you? No exiting services?
J – No, one thing that was fortunate for me, I tried to kill myself when I was 17. The porn thing got really intense so in the last year of it I tried to kill myself. It was a serious attempt so that it landed me in the hospital and they mandated counselling for me so that was fortunate for me because it was the only way I would be allowed to talk to a counsellor at the time. So I carried that on when I left. I moved to California and found a counsellor there when I went to college. Counselling was very hopeful and I was beginning to heal. I had been abused since I was 5 so there were layers upon layers of trauma to work through.
L – So this was about 30 years ago. When did you become an activist?
J – That was only recently, 3 or 4 years ago. There’s a lot of steps with healing. I had always been friends with activists. Early on more focused on rape and family violence, not always on the sex industry. I always knew people who were trying to make a difference.
I knew that at the right time I would try to make a difference myself. I knew it had to be the right time. I had seen too many survivors step into activism and tell their story too soon and end up crashing and burning into addictions and dysfunctions and so I decided to learn from their mistakes and focus on my own healing for a while before I stepped out to make a difference.
Then how that moment came about when I stated stepping out: Just prior I had gone through a season of counselling about my trauma of prostitution after that I just knew that it was time to make a difference. I began speaking my story.
I wrote my first blog about a year after I finished the counselling and it was called - Trafficked at 11 in a Portland Brothel – That was my first big step to telling my story. Around that time I started using my voice more and more on social media. Twitter is nice because it’s all about the message. I really like using my voice there. That’s how it began for me.
L – I think the most important goal is to save one survivor, yourself. The you can probably help others.
You live in California. Isn’t the sex trade entirely prohibited like most states across the US. How does this legal system work? In most states it’s decriminalised. How does this legal system affect women in the sex trade?
J – With the exception of Nevada. We have a system of criminalisation of prostitution – there’s a growing trans population in the sex trade, so when I say women I don’t mean to exclude them. I know they exist in the sex trade as well.
L – I mean everyone in the sex trade I know there are men in the sex trade who provide services to other men.
J – It’s mostly people in the sex trade who are arrested and not the sex buyers. So the women and girls and trans population being prostituted are seen and treated as criminals here in the US. There are steps towards change that are beginning to happen especially here in California.
There are a couple of areas where, even though we haven’t changed the laws, the police have been trained by survivors. They have started to take an approach to focus on criminalising the sex buyers so when they bring those being prostituted in, they offer them services and don’t actually arrest them. So that’s a good change that’s starting to happen but it’s not official yet.
I do think it’s important to change that system of criminalisation because no-one is going to report violence, theft, abuse, endangerment of themselves if they’re going to get arrested. So it’s really important to change that system.
L – You have been trafficked as a child in a country with anti-prostitution legislation. Where have the police been during those years? Why didn’t the police come and arrest everybody?
J – I don’t know the back story of the police in Portland at that time. All I know is that no-one got to that brothel where I was exploited, by accident. They knew exactly what they were doing when they came to the brothel. That brothel made a lot of money. There was no shortage of men who wanted to buy underage girls and all the girls there were about my age, roughly 11 – 14.
L – Could it be possible that the sex buyers didn’t know you were all children?
J – No, we all looked young, that was the point. When I started to look too old, that’s when they moved me onto porn. The focus was on young girls.
L – They targeted children?
J – Yes. Men knew what they were coming for.
L – In 3 years you probably met many buyers. Did even one of them try to report the brothel to the police?
J – There were cameras throughout the facility. My guess is they were recording everybody so they had blackmail material on them if somebody tried to do anything. I don’t know that for sure, I’m just speculating based on the fact there were cameras everywhere.
L – The sex trade lobby promotes the full decriminalisation of the sex trade. Their main point is that under prohibition like in the US as well as under the Nordic Model, the good clients comply with the law and the violent ones, the sociopaths, the paedophiles all thrive so they are the only ones who pay for sexual services.
Do you think under decriminalisation the child brothel could exist or it could never exist?
J – In Nevada we have legal brothels, it has been clearly shown that the brothels increase trafficking, child endangerment. I can’t remember the exact step that Melissa Holland, she works with Awaken in Reno Nevada. I can get the stats for you. But yes, an increase in trafficking, child endangerment and violence against women overall in Nevada just by having the legal brothels there.
There’s a law suit right now by survivors who were trafficked through the legal brothels because they (the State of Nevada) are allowing this harm to women and children.
So legalising pimps and brothels is not the way to free women, it’s a way to take away their money and their freedom. In a lot of the brothels the women can’t leave, they’re forced to service in all hours of the night and most of their money is taken from them and at times their documentation. That’s not freedom. That’s not solving any problems.
L – So, legalisation doesn’t make it safe?
J – No. I don’t think it would have prevented my situation. Just because something is legal doesn’t mean that illegal doesn’t happen as well.
L – You were exploited in the porn industry too. Many people believe that the adult porn film industry is less harmful than the off-line sex trade. Do you believe that pornography is less harmful?
J – No, not at all. I was trafficked in both. Porn was far more traumatic for me than prostitution. It’s whole different category of trauma. It’s the most extreme and excruciating trauma I have ever been through. For one thing it’s not one on one, that’s the main thing. People often say porn is film prostitution and I always react to that because it is not. If it was filmed prostitution then you would have a camera in a room filming you with a client, with one person, but I was almost never filmed with just one person. Gang rape was pretty much the norm. I was always having sex with multiple people on the site. Sometimes at the same time, one in the front and one in the back. The other dynamic that makes it really different from prostitution: There’s one person in front of you in prostitution that you have to navigate, often they’re dangerous, but there’s one person that you have to figure out how to survive with them for X amount of time.
On a porn set it’s you against a whole set of people who need to finish to get paid. it’s a very different dynamic. A stronger dynamic of force on a film set even than in prostitution.
The people on the set were clearly adults.
L – What do you think about men in the porn industry? Are they victims? Actors?
J – There’s a little of both, I would say. Most of the porn is misogynistic porn, men dominating women. They are usually the ones inflicting the pain. There are some men being trafficked and violence against those men. The whole set up of porn is that there’s a dominant person or group of people. There’s no doubt that some men are being harmed in porn as far as the actors go.
L – So they’re both perpetrators and victims?
J – Yes, men for the most part, run porn. They’re the perpetrators, creating this scenes of trauma where women are violated, tortured and beaten.
In the beginning when Hugh Hefner started there was what was called ‘soft porn’ where situations were faked more. It was more of a fantasy and less vile. Whet exists now is mostly hard core porn. All the sex is real, all the violence is real and all the trauma is real.
L – I’ve read that there’s a new concept of feminist pornography, produced by women and where women participate voluntarily. Do you believe in this idea? Pornography where no-one is harmed, no-one is objectified, women just perform what they’re willing to perform.
J – I’ve never actually seen it. I can’t be sure without seeing it. My question would be: Who is the audience? Most porn is produced for men so if men are the audience then despite this idealistic start about how they’re going to do it differently, I think it will evolve into misogynistic porn that characterises most of the porn today.
I don’t see how porn that revolves around satisfying male desire could ever be feminist.
If it could be made safe from human rights violations and everyone had a voice and boundaries were respected and human rights were never violated, then I wouldn’t have a problem with that kind of porn industry. But I don’t see that as possible as far a feminist pornography goes. Either they’re not going to have an audience or they’re going to change it to appeal to their audience.
L – You have recently become involved with Exodus Cry who lead a campaign against the Porn Hub website. The campaign called Trafficking Hub.
Can you tell us about it?
J – I first connected with them in 2013, I did my counselling through them. They’re an organisation which is focused on abolishing the human rights violations in the sex industry which is prostitution and porn. A lot of anti-trafficking organisations are focused on the children’s side of it. They really not, they’re about focusing on the human rights violations happening throughout the sex industry and trying to bring freedom to women, to those exploited throughout the sex industry. I really appreciate them as an organisation because I did some healing through them and they were careful and conscientious to not try to force me to speak my story, they were very hands-off with that. I had to go to them when I was ready to speak.
L – What is the situation with the Trafficking Hub campaign?
J – We have the Department of Justice looking into Porn Hub, Thailand just banned Porn Hub. There’s things like that happening every day. The Campaign started with the op ed in the Washington Examiner about Porn Hub in February of this year, not long after that the BBC and the Rose Kalemba story so those 2 things together launched the campaign. Laila Mickelwait started a petition, she works with Exodus Cry, it’s been quite a year, she has been so passionate about pursuing the truth and digging out all about Porn Hub. Sometimes a certain story captivates the public and Porn Hub has been that story this year. They had a video with 10 million views and 300 News stories about the campaign. It’s something people are really focused on and caring about and making sure women are not being trafficked and used.
There’s a lot of non-consensual rape videos on Porn Hub and all those things have captivated the public to get behind this campaign to bring change in the porn industry.
They’re claiming that because they’re a user generated website they claim it’s not their responsibility – but it absolutely their responsibility to make sure that what’s happening on their site is not trafficking, child endangerment, child abuse or rape.
L – The campaign is amazing because it managed to change public opinion about the porn industry and Porn Hub in particular. Last year they were trying to do something like saving trees, this year they are associated with exploitation, not verifying age or consent.
J – it’s been amazing to watch people get behind it.
L -Why do you think we should target sex buyers and not just pimps? Many people say that to eliminate the sex trade we should target the pimps and targeting the buyers is too extreme and not necessary. If we arrest all the pimps it would eliminate the sex trade
J –Sex buyers represent demand, pimps are just filling demand, just targeting pimps is not going to change the dynamic of the sex trade, you have to target the demand side of the equation. You have to send a message that it’s not right to be paying to have sex with somebody, which we consider as rape. You’re paying for the right to rape somebody and that is violence against women. We need to see it for what it is. You can’t change the dynamic of the violence against women without targeting the sex buyers. It’s not going to happen. I favour the partial decriminalisation model where those in the industry are not targeted and buyers and pimps are.
It shifts the power dynamic away from the sex buyer and pimp and it gives the women the power to report the violence and endangerment without fear.
The ‘sex worker’ population want the right to sell sex, it doesn’t’ hurt them either because they still are not being arrested for it but they have the power to report those men who are being violent to them. That’s why I favour the partial decriminalisation model.