Life off the Streets

By Wendy Cole/Chicago

Every time Vanessa Moody found out she was pregnant--and she found out five times in six years--she wanted to do right by her baby. So she told her tricks she'd give them oral sex only. "I really hoped nobody would have rough sex with me that would hurt the baby," she says. That sort of logic kept Moody working the mean streets and alleys of Chicago's South Side for 13 years.

It's hardly a revelation that busy prostitutes wind up pregnant from time to time. Some even find that impending motherhood is the wake-up call that spurs them to straighten out their lives. But not Moody, who treated her pregnancies as little more than temporary inconveniences. Even with a swollen belly that turned her streetwise walk into a waddle, Moody could attract customers. "Some men are into pregnant women," she notes dispassionately. Her second baby, Cartez, was born on July 2 nine years ago, and Vanessa was back on the street on the 4th, while her distraught mother and sister Debbie took care of the newborn. "I was still bleeding, but I was ready to date," Moody recalls. (And ready to smoke crack cocaine: four of her five babies were born with the drug in their system.)

That's the way it was until earlier this year when Moody, then 35, found her way to the unobtrusive three-story building known as Genesis House. Tucked close by Chicago's Wrigley Field, Genesis House is a place where hookers try to go straight. Seven days a week, around the clock, women turn up for a shower, a snack or a shoulder to cry on. They are never pressured to give up life on the street. Women like Moody are allowed to decide whether to embark on full-scale, residential rehabilitation. "We're here to plant the seed, not to be judgmental," says outreach worker Gloria Moya, a Genesis House graduate. "On top of all their other issues, these women just don't trust anybody."

Opened in 1983 by a British-born feminist theologian named Edwina Gately, Genesis House is one of just a handful of U.S. recovery centers for prostitutes. As social-service and law-enforcement agencies have learned about its success rate and unusual approach in dealing with seemingly intractable clients, it has become a model for similar programs from Florida to Thailand. Nonetheless, just when it has so much to crow about, Genesis House finds itself in financial jeopardy. The loss of half a million dollars in federal funds this year has forced the agency into an unexpected scramble to maintain its programs; it has had to lay off about half its 25 paid staff members, and use of volunteers has tripled.

Judges and police officers have long shepherded prostitutes in and out of jail with hardly a thought of rehabilitation. "Society considers them throwaway women," says Genesis executive director Gayle McCoy. She and her staff lobby judges to consider their program as an alternative to the lockup. Genesis' track record is starting to win them over. About 70% of enrollees complete the program, and 80% of graduates don't relapse, says McCoy, who bases her estimates on follow-up visits with former clients. Without Genesis House, says Raymond Risley, of the Chicago police department, "these women don't have the tools to get back on their feet."

Moody, who was an honor student in high school and studied engineering at Southern Illinois University, was a mess by the time she set out for Genesis House last New Year's Day. (On the train she spotted a friendly-looking man, went a couple of extra stops and made $10 giving him oral sex under an apartment-house stairwell before getting back on the train and reaching her destination.) Now in her ninth month of rehabilitation, she's a new woman, unfailingly polite and quick to offer a visitor a snack or a cup of cocoa. Her days are organized around counseling, classes, household chores and visits with a caseworker to help her win back custody of her kids. On Sundays she can sometimes be found sitting in front of the TV in her best dress, watching televangelists.

After she leaves Genesis, probably by year's end, Moody wants to go back to school and perhaps become a TV-camera operator, but first she is looking for work as a file clerk or receptionist. "I want to be able to support my family," she says. And, in fact, her desire to get back her five children is what spurs her on. When a caseworker brought them for a visit, Moody beamed as she fixed them bologna sandwiches. Olivia, 8, dressed in her blue-and-white school uniform, painstakingly constructed a caption for a portrait of her mother: "I miss you a lot. I want to stay with you. I love you so, so much. You are the best mom I ever had."

"Right now I feel great. I feel like a mom," said Moody as she helped them on with their jackets. "But when I'm alone in bed tonight, I might cry."