Anti-Prostitution Initiative Taken to D.C. Schools

By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 24, 2008

The day's lesson in a Coolidge High School history class in Northwest Washington was the degrading names pimps have for the girls and women whose bodies they exploit.

Exhibit A was rapper 50 Cent's "P-I-M-P," a club anthem that is an ode to the art of a male luring a female into prostitution with promises of a glamorous life under his protection. In the song, as in life, it's a ruse to enrich him.

The point of the exercise -- run by a group that typically fights sex trafficking in foreign countries -- was to highlight the intractable problem of child prostitution.

For four years, there has been a concerted effort in the District to break up prostitution networks and enhance services for youths rescued from the streets. A task force of local and federal law enforcement and nongovernmental agencies has upended child-prostitution operations.

But there's no illusion that the crime has gone away.

"There is still a market for young girls," said Bradley Myles, deputy director of the Polaris Project, which seeks to stop human trafficking.

The scope of the problem is difficult to measure. The D.C. Human Trafficking Task Force, which investigates adult and child prostitution, found 32 cases in the past year of teenage girls being coerced into sex for money by older men. Fewer than a dozen of those cases resulted in full-scale criminal investigations, authorities say.

Anecdotal evidence from police, prosecutors and groups that deal with troubled youths suggests a larger problem in the District. A national study funded by the U.S. Justice Department in 2001 estimated that as many as 300,000 runaways and otherwise homeless youths under 18 were sexually exploited.

That's one reason the Fair Fund has taken its message about trafficking and abusive relationships to District classes for the second school year.

The group typically works in Serbia, Bosnia, Russia and Kenya. But last year it signed an agreement with school officials to go into six high schools: Bell Multicultural, McKinley Tech, Woodson, Coolidge, School Without Walls and Anacostia. The schools were chosen, in part, based on police reports of family and domestic violence in neighborhoods that funnel students to the schools, said Andrea Powell, Fair Fund's executive director. This year, the program is continuing informally.

Powell founded Fair Fund five years ago and has developed a curriculum that warns students about human trafficking. Since November 2007, Powell and three other workers have reached 820 students, trained dozens of teachers and received 56 notes from students, many of them anonymous, seeking help. Some said they were raped by their fathers or know of teenagers involved in prostitution. A few said they were homeless.

Police and advocates say some juveniles trade sex for a place to stay or food.

The students "raise all these issues of teen violence, dating violence and homelessness," said Powell, 29. "One boy said he was hungry. All of these are risk factors for sexual exploitation."

These risk factors are outlined in a new report, co-authored by Powell, titled "Pathways Into and Out of Commercial Sexual Exploitation." It is based on in-depth interviews with 60 adolescent male, female and transgender youths, half in the District and half in Boston, conducted since 2006. The juveniles interviewed were between 14 and 18, and all were involved in or vulnerable to the sex trade.

In the Justice Department-funded report, one runaway told researchers that she took along a coloring book when she left home. Another told this story: "I spent the night over their house and they took me to this other man's house and then that's when . . . um . . . we was over there and I had sex with that man and then he let me stay in his house for the rest of three weeks or whatever. He was really nice."

The preliminary report calls for better of training of law enforcement personnel beyond those in specialized units devoted to youths, more emergency and transitional shelter for prostituted children and providing domestic youths with the kinds of relocation, health care and reintegration services more commonly used to combat international trafficking.

Teens involved in commercial sex are easily manipulated, said Michelle Zamarin, an assistant U.S. attorney who heads the D.C. Human Trafficking Task Force.

"They look like adults," but they think like children, Zamarin said. "When you talk to these children and listen to their logic, you realize the maturity at 15 is still a child. They believe this person loves them."

Technological advances are working against the police, said Sgt. Morani Hines, a 17-year D.C. police veteran who heads the department's human trafficking unit. Because of the government's focus on child trafficking, street traffic of minors has moved to Web sites including Craigslist, which includes ads for sexual services in hotels and private homes.

That makes it more important, he said, to reach children in other ways.

One way is to make teachers, counselors and social workers aware of what to watch for. Another is to go directly to students. Fair Fund initially targeted health classes but this school year branched into English, history and social studies classes.

During the session in the Coolidge High history class, 20 students were surrounded by graffiti-like slogans painted in large red letters on the walls. One proclaimed: "Freedom is not Free." Students were given glitter, feathers and glue to create images of a pimp and a prostitute. Some drew the glamorized images they have seen in rap videos: pimps in fancy clothes and nearly nude girls.

Others drew more disturbing images. One girl wrote a tale of horror:

He beats her because she didn't make enough money.

She realizes the truth and begins to fear for her life.

She runs away. He finds her and kills her.

The images and words sparked debate.

"I don't show no love to the ones out there in the street," one youth said of young prostitutes. But others protested, particularly after listening to the words in 50 Cent's song and realizing that the female who had been promised the world was cast off after making her pimp rich. Some students said they had not fully understood the words.

"Many of them did not know that it happens in our neighborhoods," one 16-year-old said of his classmates. "It's kind of hard for them to believe. But a lot of them are dealing with similar issues like abusive boyfriends and abusive sex. It helps them to talk about it."