N.Y. Struggles to Aid Child Prostitutes

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One Girl's Story

S. met a pimp and entered prostitution when she was 15 years old and living in a group home, she said. Now 21, she is a development assistant and outreach worker at Girls Education and Mentoring Service, a Harlem center for girls who have been commercially sexually exploited.

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"Legal leverage is the best way to provide services," said John Feinblatt, the mayor's criminal justice coordinator.

Across the country, cities and states are grappling with this issue. Las Vegas has decided to arrest and detain kids to keep them safe. Boston considers them child abuse victims and generally does not charge them but treats them. San Francisco has a hybrid model of arresting girls and then diverting them to services.

These questions arise because incidences of very young girls being coerced or forced into prostitution have become alarmingly common, according to law enforcement agencies, researchers and advocates. The age girls most frequently enter prostitution is between 12 and 14 years old, according to a University of Pennsylvania study, which also estimated there could be several hundred thousand youth being paid for sex across the country.

And although prostitution in New York has largely been chased from the Times Square area, the streetwalker culture -- often built on young girls -- is thriving in poor neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

"It's a huge, huge problem," said Kenneth Kaiser, an assistant director at the FBI, which has launched a special task force, Innocence Lost, to arrest pimps and help children forced into prostitution. "You've got young children, 12, 13, 14 -- these are innocent victims nobody ever hears about."

Another young, former sex worker is trying to change that. With sad, long-lashed brown eyes and a smile that lights up her face, she speaks publicly about her history in prostitution and has advocated passage of the bill.

At 15, she said, she was an honor student at Manhattan's Art and Design High School but left home to escape her parents' alcoholism and abuse. She ended up in a group home, she said, where she tried to commit suicide -- but no one even noticed.

Then she met a pimp, she said.

She said he told her, " 'I'm going to be your everything. I'm going to be your mother, your father, your sister, your brother, your best friend. I'm going to take care of you, I'm going to love you.' "

She was inducted into a world with the trappings of family -- a girl often calls her pimp "Daddy," his friends "uncles-in-law," his other girls "wives-in-law." But this world also has its own brutal hierarchy: If a girl looks another pimp in the eye, that pimp has the right to kidnap her. When her pimp was jailed, he bequeathed her to an "uncle-in-law," a "guerrilla pimp" who used violence. She said one of his tactics was to hold a hot iron so close to her arm that she could feel the steam melt her skin.

There were beatings, a kidnapping, a gang rape, she said, but she was always put back to work. "I felt at that point that my soul was dying. You're just going through something that's so unimaginable you just can't even think, you just can't even feel."

Then she was referred to Girls Educational and Mentoring Services, a nonprofit group that helps about 200 commercially sexually exploited girls each year, and is perhaps the best model in the state for delivering services and creating the safe and nurturing atmosphere envisioned in the Safe Harbor bill.