August 21, News Β» Cover Story. As Donna Steele walks down State Street, she keeps her head lowered and her gaze fixed on the ground as her flip-flops hammer the sun-baked sidewalk. A driver honks his horn, but the year-old ignores it.
Despite her determined stride that mid-July afternoon, her tired, floral-print dress fluttering around her ankles, Steele is acutely aware of every car that passes her. Anything else goes to food, cigarettes and money to send to her incarcerated youngest son.
Sex-solicitation busts dropped from in to 25 in But, Sgt. Steele, as well as Candyss, 44, and her partner, year-old Tina Candyss and Tina are pseudonyms , who also sell sex, agreed to tell their stories to City Weekly to underscore the need for committed resources for street sex workers. In June and July of this year, Steele resided two doors down. Each room has a bed, a dresser, a TV, a small en-suite shower and toilet.
The motel is a squat, single-story row of rooms, where drug busts and police stings of prostitutes occasionally suppress the feverish illegal activity. Steele says she used to get up at 4 a. And she desperately wants to quit prostitution. That seeming invisibility, combined with having no one to advocate for them and an inability to break out of the cycle of addiction, homelessness and prostitution, essentially leaves street sex workers feeling that they have nowhere to go.
That said, help is available, at least in theory. Sex work inevitably carries with it emotional and psychological trauma from violence, both physical and sexual. The indigent are eligible for 10 state-mandated services if they have mental-health needs, including case management to get them housing, health and mental-health care and other programs. But few if any prostitutes know that they have such rights. When told of the state-mandated services, Steele is furious.
