A Prostitute's Right to Sue?

Helen Smith's past is one she would just as soon forget. A child of Chicago's housing projects, she ended up turning tricks, but the cash lined the pockets of her polio-stricken pimp named Crip. "I'd probably make $200 a night, but he took it all. I was the young one, and they liked to show me off, but I didn't know what I was doing," she says.

Now 46, Smith finds herself on the front lines of an unlikely legal rights campaign. Along with other former prostitutes, she is trying to convince Illinois state senators to sign off on a bill that would allow current and former prostitutes to sue their pimps for emotional, physical and psychological damages in civil court. Only the states of Florida (1993), Minnesota (1994) and Hawaii (1999), as well as the federal government, have similar laws on the books, but Illinois would be the first state make it so that the plaintiff would not have to prove they were forced into the profession. The bill's language assumes anyone—women, men, young girls and boys—engaged in prostitution was coerced into the trade one way or another.

But some legislators have voiced concerns that defendants, already prone to violence, would target those filing the claim. And then there is the question of whether former prostitutes like Smith would dare to show up in court—a place they usually appeared in handcuffs—to file claims?

"The criminal side [needs] to put less energy into targeting prostitutes and more on going after the johns and pimps," said Shay-Ann Sheiser, a DePaul University law student who is completing a 50-page report on the legislative effort in her bid for Law Review. The law would include a 10-year statute of limitations, which Sheiser says "is fabulous since it takes that long for these women to get through the emotional and psychological struggles and have the financial wherewithal to do this. But often the law is the last thing they want to resort to get justice. Some have old warrants, and they might not show up in a courtroom."

But the proposed law has plenty of detractors, too. Some argue that prostitutes don't deserve what they view as special legal rights. "I think the best description for this bill is absurd," says state Senator Peter Roskam, a conservative member of the Senate Judiciary committee who is running in the Illinois Congressional race to replace retiring Republican House member Henry Hyde.

In the three states where the similar laws are in effect, few cases have gone to trial, suggesting that either the cases are settled or the burden of proof in these other states is just too high. Senator John Cullerton, the Democratic head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is expected to consider the bill later this month, said he is "philosophically in agreement with [it]." He expects that wide, bipartisan support from the House, where it passed last year with just one abstention, will carry over in the Senate. "But I need to, we all need to, look at it closely to make sure we're not just signing a law that is more symbolic than real."