On two consecutive days last month, 51 women in Phoenix were handcuffed, read their rights and taken into custody for prostitution and other sex-related crimes —business as usual for police. What happened next was anything but.
Instead of being transported to jail, the arrested women were taken to Bethany Bible Church at North 7th Avenue and Bethany Home Road, given a hot meal, hygiene kits, clothing and information about how to find support services in the future.
Project Rose is a pilot program and cooperative effort among ASU, the Phoenix Police Department and community organizations to give sex workers an alternative to being charged for prostitution, manifestation or escorting without a license.
“What we have identified in working with these community groups is that we have a service gap,” Phoenix Police Lt. James Gallagher said. “We are very good at providing services to juveniles and illegal immigrants, but not to core, life-time prostitutes.”
Dominique Roe-Sepowitz, an associate professor at the School of Social Work, specializes in work with oppressed populations, especially women and juveniles. Roe-Sepowitz helped create Project Rose.
“I think going to jail is such a hard way of telling someone we want them to stop this behavior,” Dominique said.
She said rather than approaching prostitution punitively, sex workers should be provided social services to give them the resources to exit the life for good.
Although the goal of Project Rose was not to gain intelligence about pimps and gangs responsible for prostituting the women, it has been a by-product of the project, Gallagher said.
During the project, if the women had fewer than three prostitution arrests, were over the age of 18 and had no outstanding warrants, they were eligible to receive health services and sign up for the Catholic Charities Prostitution Diversion Program. Upon completion of the diversion program, no charges are filed or mentioned on their criminal records.
The diversion program lasts three to six months and consists of a week-long, 36-hour class and a series of 14 support groups that must be attended.
Of the 51 women arrested during the project, 74 percent showed up for their intake appointment for the diversion program.
“For street- and Internet-level sex workers and exploited women, that is an incredibly high rate,” Roe-Sepowitz said. “I have never heard a number like that for any type of arrest alternative.”
Roe-Sepowitz said she hopes to repeat the program every six months or so.
All resources Project Rose provides are donated from community organizations. Roe-Sepowitz said the groups involved hope to keep it that way.
A key component of the program is that a survivor of prostitution guides the women through the project, showing them that it is possible to change their lives.
“I think that connection may have been the most valuable one,” Roe-Sepowitz said.
The School of Social Work and the Phoenix Prosecutors Office will conduct follow-up research to see if Project Rose is successful and evaluate the savings to the community.
Martha Peréz Loubert of the Phoenix Prosecutors Office said 254 people were charged with prostitution, manifestation and escorting without a license in fiscal year 2010-11.
Sixty-seven people completed the Catholic Charities Prostitution Diversion Program as well as a Prostitution Solicitation Diversion program last fiscal year, amounting to $220,674 in jail cost savings, Peréz Loubert said.
The real accomplishment of Project Rose was the cooperation of multiple community organizations to rehabilitate these women rather than incarcerate them, said Tamara Hartman, the site director for Catholic Charities’ Prostitution Diversion Program DIGNITY.
After graduating from the program and completing the support groups, Hartman said 89 percent of the women do not return to prostitution.
Women who end up in the sex trafficking business are often forced to do so by pimps or boyfriends, have a history of sexual abuse, are estranged from their families, have felonies on their records and are addicted to drugs, she said.
Hartman said these hurdles make it difficult for victims to break the cycle of prostitution.
The diversion program was “life changing,” said formerly prostituted woman Jeanne Allen.
The program taught her life skills and showed her the damage she was doing to herself and the neighborhood she lived in.
Before Allen made the decision to change her life, she said jail was a place to rest before returning to a life of abusive relationships, prostitution and addiction.
“I thought of myself as a prostitute but the truth of the matter is I was prostituted. What I did was survive out there on the streets, it isn’t who I am as a person,” Allen said.
She has been free from a life of prostitution since June 2005.
Allen was one of 21 volunteers at Project Rose to guide women through the program and said working with newcomers keeps life in perspective for her.
“I never want to forget where I come from,” she said.
Reach the reporter at lghuffer@asu.edu
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