300,000 children working as prostitutes in the U.S

[gorbal]

Q: How many children prostitutes are there in the United States?
A: No one knows for sure. Rarely are child prostitutes arrested as children. In 1981, the General Accounting Office estimated that there were 600,000 children under the age of 16 working as prostitutes in the United States. Today, International Relief Organizations suggest there are 300,000 children working as prostitutes in the U.S. It is estimated that somewhere between one and one half million children runaway from home each year. It is safe to estimate that about one-third of those children have some type of involvement or brush with prostitution and/or pornography.

http://www.childrenofthenight.org/faq.html

[bluestateguy]

1. That's scandalous

More serious than any threats the US may face from terrorism, in fact.

[Taxloss]

2. It's certainly ruining more lives. n/t

[Poppyseedman]

6. Just as scandalous

Q:How did child prostitution start in America?

A:Child prostitution was not a real problem in the United States until the late 70's. In 1974, Congress passed the Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention Act that prohibited the secure detention of runaways. That meant that the police were prevented from arresting children for running away from home. Consequently, children were left on the streets to fend for themselves. Since 1974 children have been allowed to live on the streets and they need to support themselves.

[hedgehog]

11. This was probably part of the same civil rights movement that

ended up protecting the mentally ill by making it just about impossible to commit anyone. There were valid motives behind this bill; accusations of juvenile deliquency and/or mental illness were used over the years to lock up "unruly" people. The problem is that while we ensured everyone's rights, we also walked away from ensuring that people in need were given help. Kids are left alone, but no shelters were set up. Mentally ill people are left alone and state hospitals were shut down, but where are all the community based treatment centers?

[Stargazer99]

3. Notice how the "moral" right wing are not on top of this

For all the moralizing crap they spew, they sure seem to be silent on things like this. They can sure put all kinds of publicity against homosexuality, etc but when it comes to wife-beating, child abuse, etc they are rather quiet.

[NVMojo]

5. they support hate crimes deep in their little fake fundie hearts ...

[hedgehog]

12. That's a pretty cheap shot that evades the problem.

The entire question of prostitution is so lurid that most people don't dare touch it. I've seen Christian groups that try to help prostitutes accused of doing more harm than good or of imposing Western morality or even of making up a problem that doesn't exist. As it stands, I don't recall anyone on the Left taking a strong public stand on this problem.

[tabasco]

4. How can we claim to be the best nation in the world?

The fact is we are not. The government serves the corporate masters and no one else.

People who love this country admit that we are far fom the best and are working to make it better.

[onehandle]

7. How can you rant about this when Liberals are burning flags everyday?

Won't Somebody Forget About the Children!?

Oh, wait...The GOP is on it.

[NOLADEM]

8. I truly hope this is horribly wrong

I really hope we are not that sick a society.

[hedgehog]

9. This is a city by city problem.

It won't go away until each city makes a concentrated effort to address prostitution. Some people would insist on legalizing it, calling prostitution a victimless crime. Should we control it by making it legal for consenting adults? Given the stories of the sex trade coming out of Europe, I doubt that that is an answer. The only effective crackdown on prostitution that I ever heard of took place in Buffalo some years ago. Women in the black area of the city could not walk down the street without getting accosted by white men looking for prostitutes. The police said there was nothing they could do. Black community leaders stood on Jefferson Avenue and took photos of the guys who were cruising and made plans to publish them. Problem solved. None of the johns wanted to be identified.

[mike_c]

10. wow-- that doesn't jibe with my experience, but...

...that was many years ago. I left home more-or-less permanently at 15 or 16, and ran away several times before that, once living on the streets for several months in southern cities. I also lived with a wide variety of folks, ranging from kindly ministers and their families to a biker gang group house where I sold dope on the street to keep my amphetamine psychosis going, LOL-- in that environment speed was cheaper than food. The point is that I NEVER once saw anything like the OP describes. OK, I'm male and hetero, so that likely limited my contact somewhat, but I can only think of one occasion when I saw young girls close to my age who MIGHT have been prostitutes, but they were having fun at the time, not conducting business (as far as I knew), so I really can't say how they obtained their experience.

That was during the late 60's and early 70's, so maybe things have changed-- or maybe my passage through runaway street life was atypical.

[w4rma]

13. You were too young to buy the merchandise and you aren't a girl

so it's highly likely that everyone shielded you from even the rumors of this going on.

This is something that folks would get into *a lot* of trouble for if someone, "who didn't know any better", has a big mouth.

[mike_c]

15. good point....

eom

[gorbal]

16. Check-reply#6

Answers-question(myspacebar-isn't-working-please-excuse)

[mike_c]

18. that makes sense....

I was arrested for running away several times-- I was actually sent back to my home town and jailed for being "incorrigible." Seriously, that was the charge. Eventually my parents stopped calling the cops-- but as you suggest, maybe the general environment was quite different back then. And as has been pointed out above, I was not in the most "desirable" class of potential victims.

[donsu]

14. a root cause is child sexual abuse

the cause and affect of child sexual abuse is tremendous. the human race suffers because of it.

[gorbal]

17. Recent-articles

City panel targets child prostitution
Public needs education on dangers, victims

Michelle Park
Special for The Republic
Aug. 23, 2006 12:00 AM

Thirteen years old.

That is the average age of child prostitutes in the Valley. Often contacted in malls or online, girls and boys are falling prey to pimps.

It is not an issue many want to discuss, but in Phoenix, the problem is not going away. On the contrary, it has grown dramatically. The Phoenix Police Department has identified about 60 pimps in the area, said Sgt. Chris Bray, who has worked in the unit for six years. The Police Department's vice enforcement unit spends 30 to 40 percent of its work combating juvenile prostitution.

(snip)

more-

http://www.azcentral.com/community/phoenix/articles/0823phx-prostitute0823Z3.html

Also-

DETROIT Three Toledo, Ohio, residents plead guilty to charges stemming from a nationwide prostitution allegedly involving children as young as 12.

more-

http://www.wlns.com/Global/story.asp?S=5337334&nav=0RbQ

[readmoreoften]

19. I was offered money for sex on numerous occasions before age 13

Once in a bar buying a pizza for family dinner-- and in front of my gym teacher who happened to be there ($50) Once on an Amtrak train coming back from visiting a friend in NYC ($100)

[gorbal]

20. That's-awful!

Disgusting-what-people,will-do-these-days.Some-people-are-just-plain-evil.

(spacebar-broke-sorry)

[readmoreoften]

28. That was 22 years go, I'm 35.

Sleeping with a young girl was illegal, but not quite as scandalous. As I said on another board, my 9th grade algebra teacher was reprimanded and, I think but I'm not sure, temporarily suspended for having sex with a 15 year old student (high school freshman) and being charged with statutory rape. But he was still my teacher so he most certainly wasn't fired.

Things were different in 1984.

[gorbal]

29. Perhaps-I'm-not-THAT-shocked

There-was-some-of-that-at-my-school,I-think-I-was-safe-because-my-dad-was-a-lawyer-and-my-brothers-were-large.
But-I-did-hear-stories.

(sorry-spacebar-broke)

[readmoreoften]

27. sorry wrong spot

[WePurrsevere]

21. Children should not be prostitutes. Even though the amount is now half of

what it was in 1981 it is not an acceptable amount (acceptable in this country would be ZERO). There should be more of an out reach to these children. There should be safe havens set up for runaway children where they can find food, a warm dry bed,a hot shower and if they want it some free NON-religious counseling as well.

Although I don't have a problem with adults who CHOOSE to be prostitutes and I would prefer to see it legal and safer, children are a whole different ball of wax as far as I'm concerned. Children should be protected and helped.. not necessarily to go back home if it's an abusive situation, but to find a constructive way of life that will bring them some satisfaction and hopefully some joy down the road.

[hedgehog]

25. The problem with voluntary adult prostitution is that I've never seen

it without some sort of involuntary and/or child prostitution developing alongside. It's like polygamy. In theory, some women might choose polygamy. In fact, I can't think of a single society that practices/practiced polygamy in which women and children didn't end up being exploited. Hand in hand with the problem of prostitution is the problem of pornography. There doesn't seem to be any way to regulate it without treading on freedom of speech, and a lot of people consider it their right to acquire it. Even so, paying people to perform sexual acts seems to me barely one step removed from prostitution.

[gorbal]

26. That's-a-whole-other-debate

Not-sure-I-want-to-delve-into-it-here-but-I-can-see-both-sides.

(sorry-spacebar-not-working)

[DeSwiss]

22. Child-Prostitution Cases Show Cruel Underworld

Child-Prostitution Cases Show Cruel Underworld
By Judy Keen, USA TODAY

(July 27, 2006) -- A harrowing picture of the seamy world of child prostitution is emerging in court documents stemming from a nationwide crackdown that has produced 543 arrests and 94 convictions.

Women have told investigators they started working as prostitutes for a suburban Chicago man, Jody Spears, when they were 16 and 17, according to an FBI affidavit filed in U.S. District Court here this week. "So what? Some of my best girls were minors," Spears is quoted saying in the affidavit.

Witnesses, whose names are not used, said Spears took them to New York, Las Vegas and Honolulu. The case here is part of "Innocence Lost," a project launched in 2003 by the Justice Department. The FBI set up 14 task forces in cities with the most reports of child prostitution; now the task forces are in 27 cities, says Drew Oosterbaan, chief of the Justice Department's child exploitation section.

Legal filings in other "Innocence Lost" cases reveal how pimps recruit and abuse teen prostitutes:

-- A Chelsea, Mass., woman, Evelyn Diaz was charged this month with recruiting girls who were 13, 15 and 16 to work as prostitutes. FBI special agent Tamara Harty testified that one girl, 13 at the time, told agents that Diaz took her shopping and to restaurants, then to clients in New York.

-- Juan Rico Doss of Reno was convicted last month of recruiting girls 14 and 16 to work as prostitutes in California. They were told to lie about their ages if arrested.

-- In Detroit, four Ohio residents were charged in December with holding girls as prisoners and making them call their pimp "Daddy."

-- Indictments of 16 people in Harrisburg, Pa., in December alleged that one 12-year-old girl was forced to have sex to pay for her grandfather's crack cocaine.

The indictments also said pimps from Toledo, Ohio, bought women from one another and beat them if they didn't make enough money. Of more than 100 prostitutes identified in that investigation, more than 20 were underage; the youngest was 13. Many were rotated through rest areas and truck stops from California to Maryland. The maximum sentence for sex trafficking is life in prison.

"Innocence Lost' will continue, Oosterbaan says. "When I see cases cropping up in places like Harrisburg," he says, "that suggests that the problem is more pervasive than people might think."

Norma Hotaling, founder of the SAGE Project in San Francisco, which counsels victims, once got calls only from large cities asking for help creating programs for former child prostitutes but now hears from small cities. "It's like a virus, it doesn't just go away." She says there's too little federal funding to help women make the "long journey" back from prostitution.

Celia Williamson, a professor of social work and prostitution researcher at the University of Toledo, says the crackdown "shocks the community" and prompts discussion about "modern-day slavery."

In Toledo, she says, 48% of adult street prostitutes started when they were younger than 18. A 50-member roundtable of police, social service workers, health care providers, former prostitutes and others meets there monthly to find better ways to intervene.

Various studies say 300,000 - 800,000 youths are at risk of sexual exploitation. Hotaling says the crackdown is a first step toward dealing with the problem. "Everything has been done so wrong in the past," she says. "We arrest children for their own sexual abuse and their own rape. We don't provide any services. We let them out (of jail) to their pimps."

pdf download: http://www.ncdsv.org/images/Child-Prostitution%20Cases%20Reveal%20Cruel%20Underworld.pdf

[gorbal]

23. The-numbers-grow

"Various studies say 300,000 - 800,000 youths are at risk of sexual exploitation"-quote

Facinating-article.I-want-to-work-for-them-and-bust-people-now.

(spacebar-broke-sorry)

[hedgehog]

24. We've had problems in my small town with people pimping their

children for cigarettes or dope. Some of the kids are sexually active anyways, so they go along with it for the smokes. It's a problem with migrant labor that people don't like to talk about. I'm not criticizing illegals. Young men away from home tend to patronize prostitutes. It happens in Africa, it happens here.

[WinkyDink]

30. "[W]orking"?! As oposed to being raped, legally-speaking??

[Lydia Leftcoast]

31. I used to volunteer in drop-in center for street kids, and

almost all of them spent at least part of their time on the streets as prostitutes, because, for one thing, it was a way to get a room for the night. The younger kids were in greater demand partly because the johns believed that the younger girls and boys were less likely to have STDs and partly because of the pedophile element.

To complicate matters, many of the kids were fleeing sexual abuse at home. There attitude was that if they were going to have sex with people they didn't like, they might as well get paid for it.

This didn't mean that they liked being prostitutes. It was just easy money, much more than they could make at the kind of legal jobs that a teenager can get--and of course, a 12-year-old can't get any kind of legal job. In addition, they didn't believe that they were worthy of doing any other kind of work.

One of the saddest stories I heard was when some kids were talking about a boy and girl who had become a couple. They commented that the boy must really love the girl, because he went out as a prostitute so that she wouldn't have to.

The other sad story that I heard was from an Amerasian girl who had been brought up in Thailand and pimped by her own father, an American expat. She had dual citizenship through her father and scraped together enough money to run away to America, where she drifted up and down the West Coast, doing the only work she knew. She was nearly 21 and no longer eligible for the program when I met her.

When I went through training, they told us that only about 1/3 of the kids who patronized the drop-in center would make it to age 25 without dying or being incarcerated.