Stephanie Robinson has a potent addiction these days, one she fears she may never shake.

She is a hopeless and fervent collector of vintage Pyrex dishes - particularly the vividly colored bowls with precious, old-fashioned patterns around the sides. They overflow in her kitchen cabinets and drawers, nearly overtaking her lovely, subdued Montford home.

It's touches like those Pyrex bowls, the pristine lace runner down her coffee table and the little table of heart-shaped nick-nacks by her front door that make it so surreal to sit in Robinson's living room, listening to the heart-wrenching and gritty tales she recounts of her 10 years as a crack-addicted prostitute in Asheville.

Now five years clean and sober, married to "the very nicest man" and working toward a a degree in psychology, Robinson has taken back to the streets to help the women in Asheville who are still walking them.

Working alongside several local outreach groups, Robinson has helped the Police Department dramatically reduce the number of street-level prostitution reports over the last few years, hoping to guide women out of the sex trade and into recovery and keep them safe.

More days than not, Robinson stops on South French Broad or another sex-worker thoroughfare to deliver the small, lovingly-made bags of toiletries, condoms and literature on how to stay safe on the streets that she carries around in her trunk at all times. She approaches women she sees walking the streets, hands them a bag, gives them a hug and tells them she loves them, and asks for nothing in return.

"I remember that pain of feeling like, 'I'm not worth anyone's love. I'm not worthy of help,' and that's what makes you not get into recovery," she said. "So the idea that I'm just giving them something and not asking for anything from them - it's just huge."

In the eyes of the many women at rock bottom whom she has helped, her allies at local advocacy groups, like Our Voice and even a few members of the Police Department, Robinson's former fishnets now look more like an unorthodox superhero costume.

"I have to believe that what happened to me wasn't for nothing, and that God kept me alive for a really good reason," she said. "Women won't find ways to love themselves and get help because a prison guard or someone tells them to, but they might if they see that somebody else has been exactly where they are and came back from it."

Perhaps even more unusual than Robinson's torrid journey from below rock bottom to her new, wholesome normal, is the unlikely friendship she has formed with a man who most would view as a prostitute's enemy: a cop.

Kenny Clamser, an impassioned, New York City-bred detective who joined the Asheville Police Department, met Robinson at the height of her darkest times on Asheville's streets. He met her as an addict, shuffled her in and out of county jail and even arrested her for the charge that would send her to prison for more than a year and a half.

But today the two are the tightest of allies, sharing an admiration for one another that has allowed them to reach out to troubled sex workers.

"I would say it's a very unsual relationship, yes," Clamser said, in the thick Big Apple accent he has retained. "But Stephanie was one of the girls who helped me see these women as victims, as real women, rather than straight criminals," he said.

"People tend to think of street-level prostitution as a victimless crime," Clamser said. "But the way I see it, there are real victims - the prostitutes."

Stephanie Robinson was born into a world not unlike that of most middle class kids in Western North Carolina.

She wasn't a crack baby, wasn't sexually abused, wasn't beaten, and although her mother left her to live with her grandparents at an early age, those grandparents were, "good, honest, upright people." She was a happy, preppy teenage girl who had good friends, was a member of JROTC at Roberson High School and loved shopping.

But her senior year in high school, she got pregnant. She succumbed to the pressure of being a teen mom and dropped out of school.

It was about a year later when she met a guy who introduced her to crack cocaine, a day that would define the next decade of her life.

"My grandparents worked hard to raise me right, and I was a good kid," Robinson said. "But you can't raise a person to be immune to addictive drugs, no matter how hard you try."

It didn't take long after that first time for her world to fall apart. She quickly became addicted to crack, lost custody of her then-baby girl, and got pregnant again with a son she would eventually give up for adoption.

"I couldn't take care of my children and get high as much as I needed to," Robinson said. "And getting high won by a landslide every time."

The pain from the loss of her children only fed her addiction, and propelled her deeper into a world where getting high was the only thing that mattered.

At first she just borrowed money from friends and family to buy drugs and didn't pay it back. Then she stole things she could pawn for drug money, and eventually resigned herself to selling her body.

"There's just a mentality that, 'I'm not worth anything. I'm not worth anyone's love, I'm not worthy of help, I have no value,'" she said. "When you get to that point, demoralizing yourself is like nothing."

The horrors she would live over the next 10 years are as numerous as they are incredible. She was raped, stabbed, beaten and left for dead, and once was even buried alive.

Robinson eventually found a john who took a special interest in her. He was wealthy and willing to marry her, so she jumped at his proposal and later had two sons with him.

"It turned out to be a very physically, emotionally abusive relationship," she said. "But I still just kept on coming back to him, over and over. That's how little I valued myself."

"I thought that because my mother left me, I was unlovable," she said. "So I chose men who fed that core belief, and when they abused or degraded me I thought that was all I was worthy of. It's a cycle of abuse that's very hard to escape."

During her time on the streets, which primarily consisted of South French Broad, Lexington Avenue and in the Montford area, Robinson met the cop named Clamser.

He found her rummaging through a box of donated clothes left outside the Salvation Army and asked if she was homeless or needed help, and eventually if she was a prostitute.

"If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck," she quipped, "Then it's probably a duck."

The two forged an unlikely working relationship. She told him about life on the streets and who was doing what, who needed help and how to find them, and he encouraged her to get into a recovery program. She never took him up on it.

A few years after she met detective Clamser, Robinson was raped by a john in his car. There wasn't much she could do - prostitutes' accusations didn't typically carry much weight - so when she spotted the man's checkbook on the floorboard, she grabbed it.

" It was just easy," she said. "And at the time, it felt like a small price for him to pay."

For weeks she used the checks to make purchases and get cash, completely undetected by police. Her last purchase was made at a local florist shop, where she had them deliver two dozen red roses to a handsome young APD detective, Kenny Clamser.

"That just proves to you how out of my right mind I was," she said, "I sent flowers on a stolen check to a cop because I thought he was dreamy."

He was the arresting officer when she was charged for writing bad checks, a crime that would land her an 18- month prison sentence.

But the most shocking thing about her arrest, Robinson said, was that it wasn't for prostitution.

After 10 years of sex work and substance abuse, losing custody of four children and being shuffled in and out of the county jail for everything from property damage to loitering, Robinson was never charged with prostitution.

"I was very angry at the time, as you can imagine, that he arrested me," she said. "But now all I can think is thank God I sent those roses. They saved my life."

Robinson entered a recovery program in prison and was released into a drug court program, which helps nonviolent offenders with substance abuse issues recover and reenter society.

"For 10 years, I was never not high," she said. "So I never had a moment of clarity to say, 'I don't want to be here and I don't want to do this.' The drug court process gave me that moment, and the only thing that still makes me angry to this day is that I wasn't arrested sooner."

"Ultimately it comes down to the fact that no matter who you are or what you're doing, you deserve to be safe and you have options," said Sarah Danforth, an organizer of the Sex Worker Outreach Project.

"People have to realize that sex workers are members of our community like anyone else," she said. "They went to our high schools and their families go to our churches. They aren't just exotic strangers, they're human beings."

According to a National Violence Against Women study, the rate of violence among sex workers, when compared to nonsex workers, is 43 percent higher for rape and 13 percent higher for sexual assault. Predators count on the fact that victims are not likely to report crimes against them.

"In the past and in a lot of places these girls have been overlooked and really swept aside," Clamser said. "But after I really got to know some of the [prostitutes] in Asheville, I realize they really just need help.

"The mentality has traditionally been that these girls are out committing crimes and they're just criminals, why bother?" he said. "I think Kelly's murder had a lot to do with opening peoples' eyes that this is a serious problem, and that these women are people."

Clamser guessed that 98 percent of the women he has met or arrested on prostitution charges have drug addictions, and none have ever justified having sex for money as a means to make ends meet.

"I've never met anyone who does this type of work because they have to put food on the table," Clamser said. "But they also aren't doing it because it's something they want to be out doing. Many of these women have very severe drug addictions, mental health issues or have been abused. A lot have children and families, but they're sick and need help."

Robinson spends her days now working towards her degree in psychology at AB-Tech, and eventually hopes to earn a master's degree and open a special recovery house for former sex workers.

Between running a small landscaping business, going to school full time and caring for her elderly grandmother and aunt, Robinson keeps busy being a, "completely real person." She volunteers with Our Voice, continues to work with detective Clamser and visits local prisons every chance she gets to help former sex workers find recovery programs.

"I don't regret my life and I'm not ashamed," she said. "I just have to move on and believe that if I help one person find the help that they couldn't get on their own, I'll have done my part."