Planted on the stoop is a young woman with stringy blonde hair, wearing sunglasses to cloak an already-dark night. Callahan, small and dainty under a canopy of bangs hedging her forehead, turns to her best friend, Kristen DiAngelo. They exchange a look. These onetime sex workers know a member of the tribe when they see her.
Along with a platoon of like-minded allies, SWOP Sacramento has attempted the first scholarly survey of the homegrown sex-worker population. The findings depict alarming rates of violence, medical neglect and hopelessness. Across the street from a chapel is a dingy motel where the transgender workers congregate. Fifteen blocks south is the pitch-black mouth to a mobile-home park where underage girls are trafficked, DiAngelo says.
Busier still, since federal authorities raided an online escort operation last summer. Authorities say the San Francisco-based website, which primarily served California and Nevada, facilitated prostitution and had to fall. Sex workers say the site provided a meager safeguard against predators, pimps and cops.
When it disappeared, the most at-risk workers—those of limited means and greatest need—were displaced to the streets.
But you take that risk because you have to. That desperation is what brings DiAngelo and Callahan out night after night. Crouching down to eye level, DiAngelo invites the woman on the stoop. Down the street, a female worker slides into the passenger side of a pickup truck. It drives off. Moments later, the stoop is empty, too. But a year ago, the young mother and former sex worker was operating independently.
