Local organizations say prostitution affecting a younger demographic
Vidya Rao
She’s in her early teens. Instead of choosing classes like
others her age, she’s vying for men to choose her. She’s
an unknown statistic and the face of a growing national trend: teen
prostitution.
The average age of recruitment into prostitution is between 11 and
15, with some girls as young as 9, states a recent report released
by the Girls’ Coalition of Greater Boston, “Girl Matters:
Understanding and Supporting Prostituted Girls,” authored
in partnership with more than 15 individuals and organizations working
on behalf of girls.
“This is an important issue, and we need to shed light on
it as well as the organizations working to empower young women,”
says Debra Grollman, the network director of the Home for Little
Wanderers, an organization that houses about 20 child welfare programs.
Home for Little Wanderers also has a curriculum, written by Lisa
Goldblatt Grace and former prostitute Denise Williams, which has
been taught to over 70 girls under the Department of Social Services’
care. The “My Life, My Choice” curriculum warns young
women about prostitution recruitment tactics and gives them resources
for staying away from the trade.
According to the curriculum and Grollman, pimps recruit young girls
through a number of tactics, choosing emotionally vulnerable young
women.
“There are two common denominators with all of these girls,”
says Olinka Briceno, director of the A Way Back program, a division
of Roxbury Youthworks which provides outreach and support services
to prostitutes who are minors. “They all have low self-esteem
and were most likely victims of sexual abuse, often from their own
family members.”
In fact, according to the report, 85 percent of women who become
prostitutes have had a history of sexual abuse as children.
The calculated and predatory nature of pimps is illustrated by the
fact that much of the recruitment for prostitutes is done at or
around the DSS group homes — where girls end up while being
funneled through the system, often with mental health issues and
without family support.
“Our DSS group homes are a main target. Pimps will drive by
looking for girls, try and succeed in recruiting,” says Grollman.
Young women who become part of the sex trade are often mislabeled
as promiscuous by both service agencies and the general public.
However, Grollman contends that girls are thoroughly manipulated
by savvy pimps who play on their weaknesses.
“There is a long period of what is called the grooming process,”
she says. “Sometimes a pimp will take weeks or months to prepare
a girl to make money for him; meanwhile, she thinks he’s her
boyfriend.”
During this period, girls are often given lavish gifts, money, shelter
and offered the attention that they have been starving for —
all seemingly out of love and without a price. They begin working
the street out of indebtedness or as a result of physical coercion
from the pimp, who may also threaten to hurt the girl’s family.
Technology has allowed the majority of recruitment and prostitution
to move off the streets and out of sight. Pimps advertise “job
openings” on websites such as Craigslist and can set up dates
on telephone chatlines, Briceno says.
According to Maureen Norton-Hawk, professor of sociology and co-director
of the Center for Crime and Justice Policy Research at Suffolk University,
these days, “Only 20 percent of the overall sex business is
street prostitutes. The other 80 percent is escort services and
everything that’s hidden. I interviewed a madam who runs about
12 college girls in the suburbs of Boston. Most of the girls come
from Boston College or Boston University. It’s all behind
closed doors,” she writes in the report.
Briceno believes that the demographics of girls on the street are
changing also. “In the past, African American, Latino and
some Asian girls were the prime target for pimps,” she says.
“But word on the street is that white girls bring in more
money and clients, so their numbers on the street are rising.”
Despite the trauma that the girls she works with experience at the
hands of their pimps, Briceno considers the young men to be victims
as well as perpetrators.
“Some of these young men are 19 or 20 years old, and they
too suffered through foster care, DSS and turned to pimping women
because it was the only way they knew how to make a living,”
she explains.
Instead, she contends, the real criminals are the johns, whose demand
for young girls maintains the trade.
“The johns are something we just don’t talk enough about,”
she says. [While doing outreach] I’ve seen them driving around
to pick up 13-year-old girls in their nice cars, and I think, ‘Wow,
he could be a professor or a doctor — the guy next door.’”
City Councilor Chuck Turner, Dist. 7, agrees that johns should be
held accountable to stiffer penalties. He wrote and worked to pass
an ordinance mandating fines for johns, and is currently working
to raise the mandatory fines in order to fund department of health
programs that will aid girls and women in leaving the sex trade.
As an active participant of Project RIGHT (Rebuild and Improve Grove
Hall Together), which meets monthly to deal with the issue of prostitution
in Roxbury and Dorchester, Turner and others are trying to raise
money to provide outreach services and much-needed housing for ex-prostitutes.
“There is a mythology that prostitution is a victimless crime.
But in terms of women on the streets of Boston, they are victims,
often drug addicts and often under 18,” he says.
Currently, the punishment for solicitation is the same regardless
of whether or not the prostitute is minor. However, Turner says,
“Any man that comes before a judge for solicitation of a girl
that is underage should be charged with statutory rape as well.”
Both Grollman and Briceno emphasize that there is a need for more
programs for young men, helping some to transition from being pimps
while teaching them all to see young women as more than just objects.
Grollman cites one San Francisco program, SAGE, which has a John
School that some convicted johns are mandated to attend, as an example
of what Boston could use.
The programs working towards helping young women have had varying
results in getting them out of “the life.”
“Almost every adult woman will tell me that it took trying
to get out, then going back. It’s almost cult like —
some women are in love with their pimps, for others, it may be the
end of the month and they decide to do something quick to make rent
— but they can get out,” Grollman says.
However, she adds that “We don’t have good transition
programs — we take a girl who has been prostituting, put her
in a foster family, send her to school the next day and expect her
to be able to concentrate in algebra class.”
With organizations such as Home for Little Wanderers and A Way Back,
as well as many former prostitutes helping young girls get out of
the street, the situation for many young sex workers is bleak but
by no means hopeless or impossible to change.
The FBI lists 14 cities that have the highest known incidences of
teen prostitution as of June 2005, including Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas,
Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York, San
Diego, San Francisco, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington, D.C.
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