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Fighting Back: Effort to Uncover Strip Club Lifestyle Takes Off 2/20/2003 'Dancer Hotline' Tells Women the Truth about the Adult Industry Shut down your local strip club by placing an ad in the help-wanted section?
That's the premise of the new Dancer Hotline, created by Citizens for Community Values. This initiative is growing as grassroots activists place a small classified ad in newspapers where clubs are seeking exotic dancers.
The 29-word ad gives job seekers a toll-free number to call, where they will learn what life is really like in the sex industry, before they become caught up in it, or as they are seeking new employment.
"Our main goal is to stop young women form going into the adult dancing industry," Vickie Burress, Victims Assistance Coordinator for Citizens for Community Values, told Culture & Family Report. "To bring truth to them before they are hurt. But as the project progresses, we have seen a lot of education of the masses come with it."
"There are an estimated 5,700 strip bars in the U.S.," Burress said. "Based on our research, which draws from former dancers and managers, there probably are over 200,000 girls dancing at those strip bars."
"The 29-word ad encourages girls considering the adult entertainment industry to call a toll-free hotline number before they go any further," she added. "On the toll-free number, the girls first are greeted by a former dancer who states that the purpose of the hotline is to introduce the caller to a side of dancing that she will not hear from the managers with whom she might interview, a side the speaker learned the hard way."
The caller is then given the option to listen to a message from one of three other dancers from various parts of the country.
"These girls describe the harms that they suffered in the business, including physical abuse, low self-esteem, various other emotional disorders, and accompanying drug and alcohol abuse," Burress added.
At the end of that story, girls are given a phone number and e-mail address to reach the speaker for further information and counseling.
"It is our hope that you, and many other pro-family organizations, as well as individuals, will want to run the classified hotline ad in key local or college newspapers where strip clubs are advertising for dancers," she added.
"All we ask is that you follow a few guidelines," Burress said. "Run the ad script as it is shown below, without change, and advise CCV when and in what papers the ads are being run."
So far, the ad has been placed in the classified section of two newspapers, one in New York and the other in Cincinnati. Small newsletters and pro-family magazines across the country have also published the ad. Two Indiana papers have refused to run the ad, Burress said.
"We have records of where the calls are coming from and they are literally all over the nation," Burress added. "Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, West Virginia, Georgia, Las Vegas, California, Arizona, New York, and Michigan have all originated calls in response to the ad."
Burress says that response rate shows how powerful the effort is, even though it has been slow to build momentum.
"We have reports of legislators, city officials and such who are interested in passing legislation to regulate strip bars calling the number to see what really happens in these clubs," she added. "Most citizens are oblivious to what really goes on in these adult establishments. And young women who become caught in the industry eventually lose all contact with the normal, everyday world."
The sex industry markets itself as an easy, high-paying job for young women seeking a career in entertainment. Club ads tell women that they can be in full control of their lives when they choose to work at a strip club.
The promise couldn't be further from the truth. According to a survey of sex club workers, women typically work in the clubs as independent contractors without any benefits or federal employment protection. They work only for tips and must pay the club owners a large percentage of those tips.
"Usually a minimum shift quota is set and the women must turn over at least that quota amount," said Kelly Hosopple, with the Community Defense Coalition, in testimony before the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on Civil Defense on December 3, 2002. "If a woman does not earn the quota and wants to continue working at the establishment, she owes the club and has to pay off that shift's quota by adding it to the quota for the next shift she will work."
A portion of a dancer's tips must also go to bouncers and DJs. Women face fines for being late to work, being late on stage, not stripping in a management-set way, talking back to customers or managers, or calling in sick. Women have their performance, appearance and bathroom breaks regulated by the club.
Adding to these restrictions, women face physical and sexual abuse from customers, managers and owners; drug and alcohol abuse; and pressure to engage in prostitution.
Once a woman is drawn into the strip club business, "she's working until 2 in the morning, staying out all night partying [getting high, drunk or both] after work, and then grabbing a breakfast with the girls [other dancers]. They wake up, go to work, and the cycle starts all over," David Sherman, former Midwest manager for the sexual oriented business Deja Vu, told the Ohio Senate Judiciary Committee on Civil Justice.
"They have no time to go to the post office, the dentist, or any other normal things," he added. "They are deep into the club scene and on the road to hard times and even self-destruction. At this point, school, family and friends have faded into a world that no longer exists for them."
His testimony, based on his 14 years of working in the adult entertainment industry, chronicles how young women, including underage girls, are lured into dancing and stripping for the clubs after being hired as waitresses, hostesses or bartenders.
He has seen how young, attractive girls are lured into the business, held there by manipulative tactics, and then are forced to lower themselves to perverse acts on stage and prostitution as their youth and beauty wane.
"With friends and family gone from their lives, they solely exist in this dark subculture of sex, drugs, alcohol and prostitution," Sherman added.
Abortion is rampant because the dancers can't afford to mar their bodies through child bearing, and they also can't afford to take time off work to have a child.
"Sadly, these young ladies over time, little by little, become manipulated, controlled and finally destroyed by a world that our communities have closed their eyes to. They become society's throwaway people, used up, degraded, abused and even sold by the people who own these establishments. It has been just as much our fault as theirs for letting these places do this to our children, daughters, nieces, granddaughters, and yes, even mothers," Sherman said.
Placed in a local or college newspaper where women are recruited for such work, CCV's classified ad can reach young girls before they are pulled in, and offer hope to those looking for a way out of their current exotic dancing job.
CCV's name is not used in the ads or the phone message. If you would like further information on the Dancer Hotline or the ad campaign, please contact Vickie Burress at 513-733-5775 or e-mail her at vickieburress@ccv.org. |
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Concerned Women for America 1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100 Washington, D.C. 20005 Phone: (202) 488-7000 Fax: (202) 488-0806 |
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