Violence in Chicago's Sex Work Industry

Garbage cans. Abandoned buildings. Vacant lots.

These are some of the places since 2001 that the bodies of 51 female murder victims were found strangled and abandoned in the city of Chicago. The commonalities: many of the women were found in public places, many had a history in sex work, and all have gone unsolved.

“When a woman is murdered, usually the offender is someone she knows, sometimes quite well, so the list of suspects is small,” said Thomas Hargrove, whose unsolved homicide tracking algorithm first brought the similarities in these murders to light. “But in this case, overwhelmingly, these strangulations have gone unsolved. That’s very, very unusual. Part of the difficulty,” Hargrove went on to suggest, “is a lot of these women were involved in sex work, which can make the suspect pool larger, and it’s not as easy to get potential witnesses to talk.”

Locations and details of the 51 unsolved strangulations that took place in Chicago from 2001 to 2018. Graphic by the nonprofit Murder Accountability Project. (www.murderdata.org)

New attention to these murders comes on the heels of the MAP report, with the Chicago Police Department’s announcement that they would be taking a second look into a possible connection between the unsolved cases. However, the sheer number of victims and sexual components of many of the cases is indicative of another issue: the violent reality of Chicago’s sex industry.

The sex work industry—especially street-level sex work—is arguably the most dangerous profession in the United States. American prostitutes boast a murder rate 20 times the national average—204 for every 100,000—a high number to consider when between 16,000 and 25,000 girls and women are involved in prostitution-related activities in the Chicago area every year, according to the Intersystem Assessment on Prostitution in Chicago conducted by the mayor’s office on domestic violence.

In part, the danger and violence exhibit in the sex industry stems from the surrounding societal stigma, which Cecilia Benoit establishes in her research on the intersection between stigma and the effect on the lives of sex workers. In an academic article published in 2018, Benoit and her fellow researchers note the role stigmatization plays in “fostering an environment where disrespect, devaluation, and even violence are acceptable responses to those who are stigmatized.”

Customers are the most frequent perpetrators of violence across all venues of sex work and account for 62 percent of all violent acts against street-level prostitutes.

Eighty-six percent of women on the street reported having been slapped, 70 percent were punched, and close to 80 percent had been threatened with a weapon at least once, according to a research study taken around the same time that the Chicago strangulations began occurring.

High percentages of women had experienced violence while engaged in prostitution from customers, pimps, intimate partners, managers, police officers, and neighbors. Women on the streets, in drug houses, and in hotels reported high rates of forced sex and physical violence, with almost one-fourth of women in drug houses being raped more than 10 times.

The Center for Impact Research data table showing statistics for violence experienced by female sex workers.

Still, even in such a risky industry, the Chicago strangulations remain a national outlier.

“It’s fairly unusual to have such a large cluster of unsolved strangulations,” Hargrove said. “What happened in Chicago does not happen most places.”

Across the nation, offenders are identified 77 percent of the time in cases of strangulation or asphyxiation. According to the report released by MAP, however, though Chicago accounts for only 0.8 percent of the nation’s population, it is responsible for 7.7 percent of the nation’s unsolved strangulations and asphyxiations.

The report, which details Chicago’s below average rate—only 28 percent—for solving female strangulations, has sparked questions surrounding the possibility of a serial killer in Chicago, as well as multiple protests. Several activists organizations have attributed the lack of attention given to these murders as having to do with race, as a majority of victims have been black women.

“It’s been over 10 years,” said activist Washington Baily. “Some of these cold cases go back as far as 2001, and the majority of these young women are black so I believe there is an injustice due to racial disparities. These young women are poor. They work and live in poor communities and I don’t think the same sense of urgency has been given as it would if this happened in a more affluent area.”

Baily is a member of the Freedom First organization, who was involved with a protest outside the Chicago FBI headquarters earlier this year. The protest encouraged that the FBI get involved with the investigation, as some feel the city has already mishandled these murders.

“Our organization got involved,” Baily said, “because we wanted to make sure that this process, the process of bringing attention to this tragedy and how these young ladies were murdered, we want to make sure that the public gets that information.”

For Baily, it is important that these murders be recognized and addressed with the urgency and respect the victims deserve, adding that, “many were just young women who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”