Cherie Jimenez

Boston, USA

As survivors, we know first-hand the devastating effects of commodifying our bodies in the sex trade, especially after years of selling a piece of ourselves while trying to keep ourselves whole. A lot of us never even made it out. In 2005, I founded an exit program here in Boston MA, which became one of the few emergency safe homes in the country.

I was the director up until 2024. During those years, I heard the stories of hundreds and hundreds of young women, even though we came out of different generations, different cultural backgrounds, we shared the same situational factors that rendered us vulnerable. If we put all our stories together, it would add up to thousands of stories of rape, beatings, exploitation and often torturous relationships. It didn’t even include the struggle of poverty and the dysfunction and abuse that often precluded life before prostitution. One year, we had over 65% of young women reported to have aged out of systems at 18, tossed into a violent throwaway world of commodification, from homelessness to institutions and incarcerations. For a lot of us, the mind-body split required in prostitution brought on a heroin addiction. I didn’t start out with one, for so many of us, it masked the feelings of rage and suicidality. This is certainly not a job like any other.