Special Mission Helps Women Get Off the Streets : Rehabilitation: The Mary Magdalene project helps prostitutes find a new way of life.

Ana Espinoza became a prostitute before she was old enough to drive. She started at 14, after she ran away from home or her mother kicked her out--she’s not sure anymore.

Now 22 and in jail, she’s desperate to leave, desperate to find another way to live. At least that’s what she is telling Linda Culbertson, who sits on a hard wooden stool in the Sybil Brand women’s jail near downtown Los Angeles, listening, staring intently.

Culbertson, a Presbyterian minister, runs one of the only programs in the nation that attempts to help prostitutes trade the streets for a normal life.

As Culbertson briefly explains how she can help, Espinoza hunches forward. Eyes wide, face frozen, like a doe caught in headlights, she picks nervously at her nails. A tiny, permanent tattoo of a tear etched underneath her left eye stands as a reminder of a son who died.

“Maybe Mary Magdalene’s the answer, maybe not,” Culbertson says. “We’ll find what’s right for you. But first tell me why you left home.”

The story tumbles forth in fits and starts, between snorts of laughter and long, little girl sniffs. Espinoza says she has met her real father only once, has been raped by her stepfather, was pimped in exchange for food and a motel room, tried to commit suicide twice and hawked herself on street corners to pay for drugs.

Culbertson takes a package of Kleenex from her purse and hands it to Espinoza, who mops up the tears and continues.

“It started when I was 9. I couldn’t take it anymore, my stepfather, he would touch me, worse, he would, you know, all the time. I had to leave,” she says, shredding the Kleenex, her watery eyes avoiding contact.

“My mother, she caught him once and it stopped for a while, but I couldn’t be around him anymore. So I guess I ran away. The last time I tried to talk to my mom about what he did, she said, ‘That’s been so many years ago, why are you still thinking about it?’ I told her, ‘Because it’s still there.’ She said, ‘Well, it shouldn’t be.’ ”

Culbertson isn’t shocked. For five years, she has been director of the Mary Magdalene project in Santa Ana, patterned after a similar rehabilitation program she helped found 10 years ago in Reseda.

She knows the pattern that leads girls to prostitution so well that she often surprises the inmates by correctly predicting their stories before they’ve even told her.

Every once in a while, though, “the horror of their childhood will knock my socks off,” she says.

One woman told her that she had a child at age 12, the product of a group rape her father had arranged. Another grew up in a cult whose members raped her. Another had horribly deformed hands--her father had pounded them with hammers and burned them with irons. Another watched her drug-addicted mother shoot her abusive father to death.

The path to prostitution starts with a dysfunctional family and usually includes incest, rape, neglectful parents, abandonment, Culbertson says. That leads to a lack of education and skills, an inability to cope with the pressures of a daily job, drug addiction, alcoholism, abusive relationships--all symptoms of the illness Culbertson calls “post-traumatic childhood syndrome.”

“My job has very little relationship to prostitution,” she says. “Drugs and alcohol are the masks that hide the real problem, which is always rooted in their childhood. My role is to somehow help free them from this horrendous pain that destroys their lives, to show them they’re not to blame.”

Linda Culbertson grew up in Wilmington, the oldest of three children. Her father was a carpenter, her mother a homemaker. They were church-goers who helped friends in need. Her parents led Scout troops, joined the Chamber of Commerce and registered to vote in opposing political parties. Dinner-time conversations were heated.

“My parents gave me a lot of freedom to be who I was. They allowed me to be different and think differently. I was always very radical, always thinking about the world, always opinionated. I grew up in a time when it was OK to do a lot of questioning.”

In the ‘70s, she became a teacher in a gang-plagued neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles, fought for desegregation, did graduate work in counseling and volunteered for the board of the Presbyterian church’s synod on women and justice.

Through her church, she began to work with prostitutes. Hundreds of teen-age girls from across the country were running away from abusive families and heading for Hollywood with dreams of becoming the next Farrah Fawcett or Suzanne Somers. Most landed on the street, homeless, hungry, without jobs or skills. They sold themselves.

The minister of the Presbyterian church on Sunset Boulevard noticed the teen-agers working the streets, and called Culbertson’s synod for help. The church provided enough money to rent a house in Reseda and hire Ann Hayman, a Presbyterian minister, to run the program. The house opened in 1980.

They called it the Mary Magdalene project, named after the prostitute Jesus Christ was said to have rescued. Culbertson served two years on the board of directors before going to a Chicago seminary to become a minister.

Meanwhile, Southern California was becoming the teen-age prostitution capital of the nation. Police began an aggressive campaign to arrest prostitutes in Hollywood, prompting the majority to move to the San Fernando Valley and various cities in Orange County. In the early to mid ‘80s, hundreds of prostitutes began appearing in force on boulevards in Garden Grove, Westminster and Santa Ana, in places where they had been rarely seen.

The Mary Magdalene board of directors decided to open an Orange County house in Santa Ana in 1985 and asked Culbertson to be the director. She decline. But after an 18-month search, when the board still had no one to run the house, Culbertson agreed to do so--on a temporary basis.

Five years later, she’s still there. “She is their mom,” says board president William Barstow. “She’s tough, but extremely sensitive too.”

Neighbors have no idea that up to half a dozen former prostitutes live on the corner in the large, comfortable middle-class home with trimmed lawns and fruit trees. It looks like the others in the Santa Ana neighborhood.

Fearful of provoking their wrath, Culbertson refuses to allow the women or the house to be identified.

At home, she forces structure and discipline on her charges, showing them for the first time how to live a normal life.

A pillow is never out of place, the counters are always clean and a pot of coffee stays warm on the stove from morning till evening. Culbertson shares the cooking and cleaning and drives the women where they need to go--work, therapy sessions, school, the store.

On the refrigerator is a schedule of chores, so detailed that the living room is divided into 10 assignments, from vacuuming to tidying the newspapers. The women exercise, eat three balanced meals a day and learn the basics of hygiene and health that they either forgot or never learned.

The change is substantial. On the street, they survived on fast food and drugs, often with no place to shower or change clothes. They arrive with black teeth, greasy hair and no idea how to open a bank account or even pick tomatoes in a supermarket.

Although many women drop out before the yearlong program ends, only two of the 120 who have stayed in the last decade have returned to the streets.

“Getting these women to change is very difficult,” says Ernest Proud, a therapist with Orange County’s Health Care Agency who works with the women in the Magdalene project. “I’ve worked with a lot of programs and this is probably the most well-rounded, best opportunity for women to get off the street and change their lifestyle.”

Culbertson is very particular about whom she accepts. She refuses to take mentally ill or drug-addicted women and does little recruiting. Instead, she asks court officers, attorneys and social service workers to distribute literature about the program. Then she waits for the calls.

“I don’t want them unless they’re ready to work at it,” Culbertson says. “She has to do it. She has to call me.”

Culbertson runs the house on a yearly budget of a little more than $100,000, and depends on churches, foundations and wealthy donors. The program accepts no government money.

Most of the prostitutes she works with are white and poor, though a few come from the middle and wealthy classes. Typically, they run away in their teens, hook up with an abusive man, run away again, become addicted to drugs and use prostitution to support expensive habits.

As the numbers of drug-addicted women have increased, the funds for programs have dwindled, despite the cost effectiveness of treatment. According to a Magdalene study, each drug-addicted prostitute costs taxpayers an average $145,000 in law enforcement over a decade, the typical career span. The average cost per resident who completes the Mary Magdalene project is $25,000.

Few programs like Mary Magadalene exist. Drug treatment is extremely limited for women without money or insurance. In Los Angeles and Orange counties, with a combined population of 10 million, there are fewer than 150 beds for female drug addicts who cannot pay for treatment. Very few allow children.

Recovering drug addicts are always emotionally impaired, Culbertson says, which leaves her with a house full of adult women who behave like pre-adolescents: “It’s incredibly difficult. They have kids of their own now tugging at them to be mature mothers and yet they never had that themselves from their own mothers.”

It is also difficult for Culbertson. “They hang around my skirt like a 7- or 8-year-old, craving hugs,” she says. “One regressed to a toddler. She was constantly in my shadow. She’d only communicate with happy face pictures.”

Others become rebellious teen-agers, reverting to drugs and abusive relationships, fighting fiercely with the other women in the house over imagined slights, she says. “I have to wait for them to grow out of it.”

Culbertson is often discouraged, especially because she often wants more for them than they want for themselves. Ideally, the women would become independent and equal partners in relationships with men. But in reality, they take traditional female jobs as clerks and secretaries and struggle in their relationships.

When a county psychologist said the best Culbertson could hope for one woman was to “ ‘marry her off,’ I almost killed him!” Culbertson says. But when the woman did marry, Culbertson discovered it was for the best.

“I’ve learned that they can still be successful even though they haven’t come as far as I’d like,” she says. “No matter what the outcome, something has really changed. They’ve learned: You’ve valued them. You’ve loved them differently. In that way, no one’s been a failure to me. They may not end up where I want them, but I’ve made a difference.”

She pauses. “But they certainly don’t turn out to be radical feminists.”

Kimmie is a Culbertson success story with a familiar history: Abused as a child, she married an abusive husband while still in her teens. She left him, lost her job, her apartment, her daughter and her will. She became addicted to drugs and alcohol, nearly dying on the streets after a particularly severe beating from her pimp.

The shock compelled her to find a drug treatment program and the Magdalene house. In the last year, she has had therapists, job training, courses in finances, nutrition and feminist studies. She found work as an executive secretary and saved $10,000. Most important to her success, she says, was Culbertson. “She unconditionally loves you until you learn to love yourself,” says Kimmie, who asks that her real name not be used.

A month ago, Culbertson asked her to leave. Kimmie pleaded to stay.

“It’s hard for me to say, ‘It’s time for you to go.’ . . . I wonder, am I doing the right thing?” Culbertson says.

“But I don’t want them to depend on me anymore. The whole purpose of this program is to teach them they can take care of themselves, that they’re strong, capable women and they can survive no matter what. At that point I tell them, ‘I’ve given you all the tools you need. You just have to use them.’ ”

Kimmie, along with dozens of others, found she could make it alone: “The first couple of nights I called just to hear Linda’s voice on the answer machine. But every day that goes by, I’m a little more comfortable with myself. I worry less and less because I know, no matter what happens, Linda will always be there.”

Even the dozens of women who drop out and return to the streets keep in contact.

“I’ll get calls from them on their birthday, during the holidays,” Culbertson says.

“They ask, ‘Do you remember me?’ I represent hope to them. A lot come and they’re not ready to reach out and grab it. But they always call me back to make sure that it’s still here.”