AURORA | Brenda Cisse prostituted herself to buy crack for more than two decades until 2008. In that year, she stole $40 for drugs from her own daughter and only friend. It was then that she became scared of her own shadow.
“My best thoughts got me in the worst places,” said Cisse, 58. “I didn’t trust my thinking. It wasn’t right.”
Until her early 30s, the Aurora resident made a respectable living working at a nursing home and a dry cleaning company. By age 54, she had gotten herself into a mess of a life she knew she couldn’t crawl her way out of alone. She had been in and out of jail for prostitution, slept in abandoned apartments, bathed herself using water from sinks at convenience stores, and was addicted to crack cocaine.
If the Arapahoe County court system hadn’t diverted Cisse to a program at Aurora Mental Health Center, she said she would have continued living her nightmarish life as a prostitute and a drug addict until death rescued her. Instead, psychiatrists and therapists rescued Cisse from herself.
Now, she’s a spirited, compassionate student working toward an advanced degree in psychology at the Community College of Aurora. She will be an integral part of a program set to be launched by the city of Aurora and Aurora Mental Health Center next year, which aims to rehabilitate 10 prostitutes who have been repeatedly arrested by Aurora police. The program, called FUTURE (Females Utilizing Treatment and Undertaking Recovery Efforts) is being funded with a grant of about $415,000. Under the program, the women will be treated by psychiatrists, licensed therapists, case managers and peer mentors, and they’ll live together in a “safe house” in an effort to protect their privacy said Mark Olson, program director at Aurora Mental Health Center.
“This is a population we’ve identified as having mental health issues,” he said. “We’re looking to help the community we live in by trying to help these people change and become contributing members of society.”
Emotional problems run rampant among prostitutes, Cisse said. Sometimes she and a few other women would pool money together for a hotel room where they would get high and inevitably start swapping accounts of their lives.
“It was all the same story,” Cisse said. “Rape, sexual abuse, child molestation. Then the depression would come. We’d all go into this depression at the same time and then we’d all get up and say ‘Let’s go get some more money.’”
Cisse turned to drugs at age 30 to block out the memories and residual pain left from being sexually abused at a young age. Getting high was the only way she could repress those thoughts. She scored money to chase the next high first by stripping, then by prostituting. When she became skinny — at one point, a scrawny 80 lbs. — she was thankful for jail time. In the confines of her room behind bars, Cisse could rest, eat and regain her strength.
Cisse prostituted herself from Aurora all the way to Dallas, Texas, sometimes not knowing how she made it from one city to the next. On a bad day, Cisse would make about $1,000. By 2008, she became weary of her destructive life. She couldn’t dodge her debilitating thoughts any longer, and she knew she needed help. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder by a psychologist in jail, and then transferred to professionals at Aurora Mental Health Center who helped her cope with her past as part of a five-month long program called ADMIT (Arapahoe Diverts Mentally Ill to Treatment.)
She credits one particular therapist at Aurora Mental Health Center for renewing her sense of worth.
“She let me know it was OK for me to feel good about myself,” Cisse said. “Even though I had lived a bad life, she let me know I wasn’t a bad person.”
About 45 percent of prostitutes are typically victims of sexual abuse and were molested as children, said Zelda DeBoyes, administrator at Aurora Municipal Court. There have been about 540 arrests related to prostitution in Aurora since 2009, she said. City officials have cracked down on prostitution along Colfax through tougher ordinances and stings. During a sting in November, police officers arrested nine people for crimes related to prostitution. The city’s “order-off” rule has also been one of the most effective tools in curbing prostitution, DeBoyes said. Under the rule, a person arrested for prostitution is banned from Colfax for any reason other than access to transportation as part of their plea bargain. If they’re caught on the street, they are often sent directly to jail. But jailing prostitutes doesn’t work because more often than not, they’re repeat offenders, DeBoyes told members of an Aurora City Council Public Safety Committee meeting on Nov. 14. The FUTURE program will mark the first time in city history that the focus will shift to rehabilitating prostituted women instead of repeatedly disciplining them to no avail.
“We’re excited about reaching out to a population that we have not been able to impact,” DeBoyes said at the meeting. “If the cops pick them up, until they get sentenced, they may be out on the street again. We think this is going to be an opportunity to really change these women’s lives around.”
The city might not have the money to continue funding the program after grant dollars run out, but Judge Richard Weinberg said he hopes the program will have lasting impacts on the north Aurora area.
“We’ve all been very concerned with the Colfax corridor and how to reduce crime and rejuvenate that area,” he said at the meeting.
When the program launches next year and the women are housed together, Cisse will become a “house mother” on the weekends to provide support and encouragement. During the weekdays, she’ll continue her schooling and spend time with her new husband, whom she married in October. Cisse, now brazen and vivacious, hopes to share her story of triumph over mental illness with women going through the catastrophic journey of a life she knows well. She’s hopeful that the program’s prostituted women have the will and desire to change, just as she did four years ago when she arrived at Aurora Mental Health Center for treatment.
“This was the last house on the block for me. If I didn’t get it this time, I was done,” she said. “I needed a place to live and be able to get help. I said, ‘Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.’”
Reach reporter Sara Castellanos at 720-449-9036 or sara@aurorasentinel.com.
Wow, what a story.
Praise God for second chances.
Brenda I so happy for you to see your vsions come true!
Glad she got help, but honestly your giving these women a free ride when they have messed up, how about helping those in Aurora who can’t afford to go to school, but don’t qualify for grants!! Help us out not the ones who always be messing up, this is what pisses me off. If you have a kid you get grants, now if you prostitute yourself or do drugs you get grants I guess I should start doing this instead of being a good working citizen so I can go to school!
hi ms Brenda i am so happy you get it. hi you see it was god that did it for you i love you in a sister way OK for little Wayne you go Gail