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.