In a Shift, Anti-Prostitution Effort Targets Pimps and Johns

Donna M. Hughes, a professor of women's studies at the University of Rhode Island, said she was suspicious at first. She looked across the table at Duke and at a woman from the conservative Concerned Women for America: "I thought, 'Don't they eat feminists for breakfast?' "

Ultimately, they were able to march together by blinding themselves to everything but the women they hope to help.

On the Hill, Maloney said it was the reason she could team up with Pryce, chairman of the House Republican Conference. Maloney had met a woman named Tina Frundt at a hearing, who told her life story. Frundt said her foster mother's boyfriend had sold her for sex at the age of 10. "I kept interrupting her," Maloney said. As Frundt tried to talk, Maloney's stomach churned. "Psychologically, I could not stand to hear her."

Victimless Crime 'a Lie'

Frundt was 14 when a man in his twenties persuaded her to run away. She thought it was about love. He brought his friends over to gang-rape her. Soon he was selling her body to support them: $75 for oral sex, $100 to $125 for "basic sex," $200 for anal sex or for an additional person. A pimp who controls four women, said Derek Ellerman, co-executive director of the Polaris Project, an anti-sex-trafficking group, makes more than $600,000 a year in cash. When Frundt disobeyed her pimp, she said, he broke her arm with a bat.

"I was 14. I looked 14. I was sleeping with men who were 65 years old," said Frundt, 31, who joined the left-right coalition. She said her customers, bald and wrinkled, had sex while complaining about their wives; she closed her eyes. One fat client reeked of Bengay ointment. Afterward, she threw up. "They're sexual molesters and child abusers. I have to remember that abuse for the rest of my life. So why shouldn't they?"

Frundt, now a counselor at the Polaris Project, said that the average age of girls who enter the sex trade is 13. Like victims of domestic violence, she said, the girls are afraid to leave their pimps. They call their pimps "Daddy." If they report a pimp -- "He's going to beat your butt."

It was stories such as Frundt's, said Cornyn, that convinced him he should fight for the legislation. "A victimless crime?" he said. "Yeah, right, that's a lie."

And yet for Frundt and for others in the coalition, it is hard to believe that anyone would care. Norma Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project Inc., a drug and mental health program for women in San Francisco, has a metal plate in her head with wires and screws from a pimp who delivered a "bitch slap" when she refused to work.

As the director of SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation), Hotaling attended a reception in Congress for the Victims of Trafficking and Violence Protection Act, which passed in 2000. The act assists foreign women who are sold for sex. At the reception, Hotaling met Horowitz, whose coalition had worked on a variety of human rights issues including religious persecution abroad and global sex trafficking.

"I said, 'What about me? What about my sisters?' " Hotaling said. Horowitz told her he was mired in anti-prison-rape legislation but when he was done he would address domestic sex trafficking. "I thought I was hallucinating," she said. "I was talking to someone who was very right-wing -- and he was concerned."

In their work together, Hotaling encouraged Horowitz to include a provision about educating and sensitizing law enforcement. She recalled the night the pimp broke her eye socket. The police let him go. They said it was her fault. Her cheekbone and jaw were crushed, so all she could do was wince -- mute -- when one of the men shrugged and said, "She's just a whore."

Photos on the Web, Decoys

About 50 detectives were watching a training video on human and sexual trafficking at the Washington Fraternal Order of Police Lodge. Men with shaved heads who were chewing on toothpicks, burly men in leather jackets -- recoiled, appalled.