by MARK GABRISH
CONLAN
Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
You’ve probably
seen the scenario in a hundred bad or mediocre movies or TV shows. The innocent
young teenage runaway, newly arrived in the big city, suddenly realizes what a
tough time she — sometimes he — is going to have finding food, a place to stay
and any stability in her life. Then she’s approached by a nice young man who
offers to help. Let me buy you breakfast, lunch, dinner, a new handbag, a
manicure, some cosmetics. He gives her money and puts her up. Maybe they start
dating and for a few weeks she thinks she’s one of the lucky ones who’s found a
lover and ducked the dangers of the streets.
Then it’s
payback time. He tells her she needs to start earning back the money he’s spent
on her. He’s got a few friends who want to have sex with her and they’re
willing to pay him for the privilege. If you really love me, he says, you’ll go
along with this. Just this once. And then again. And again. Soon she finds that
she’s “in the life” — the common euphemism people who have sex for money
(usually money that goes to someone else, not them) use to refer to such an
existence. She’s also likely to find herself hooked on alcohol and/or drugs,
given to her by her “boyfriend” — really her pimp — both to help her face the
rigors of “the life” and to make it less likely that she’ll resist or try to
escape. And to make doubly sure she doesn’t do anything to weasel out of it,
he’s likely to threaten to hurt or kill her family if she tries it.
It may seem like
a hopelessly clichéd scenario, but it happens every day on the streets of San
Diego, said San Diego Youth Services social worker Michelle Atkins to the
Queer-rights group Canvass for a Cause (CFAC) at their Hillcrest headquarters
March 14. Indeed, according to Atkins, San Diego is one of the top 13 cities in
the U.S. for what she refers to as CSAC — “Commercial Sexual Exploitation of
Children” — mainly to avoid the loaded word “prostitution,” which makes the
girls (and boys) seem like criminals instead of victims. What’s more, the
traffic in human beings for sexual exploitation has become the number two
source of income for criminal gangs, behind drugs but ahead of illegal weapons
sales, Atkins said.
Atkins spoke
mostly about STARS (Surviving Together, Achieving and Reaching for Success),
the program she runs under San Diego Youth Services auspices to help teenage
girls get out of “the life” and on track for a positive and productive future.
She could have told horror stories all night, but Atkins wanted to focus on her
group’s success stories. Indeed, she brought one of them with her: a young girl
who’s recovering from the ordeal of being trafficked but who still visibly bore
the scars of her experience. Except when Atkins asked her to address the group,
she sat on the floor in a corner of the room, turning down the offer of a seat,
looking at her laptop and obsessively fiddling with her cell phone — a remnant
of the electronic leashes pimps turn their women’s cell phones into, requiring
that they continually text them how many tricks they’re turning, how much money
they’re making and where they are.
“One young woman
we worked with was 13 and already had a child by a rape,” Atkins recalled. “Her
family had kicked her out, and she met people who said they could find her work
as a maid. They took her child, and took her to the work camps at Escondido and
forced her to have sex with 40 men a day. They told her if she left, they would
kill her child. Eventually she did run,
and she went to a house in Escondido where they called the police. We got her
out, but it took us more than seven months to find her child. That was one of
the more severe cases.”
Atkins made the
point that virtually all the women who are trafficked have been put at risk by
other things going on in their lives well before they hit the streets and are
suckered into “the life.” “Before they are trafficked, 34 percent have a
history of domestic violence in their family, 40 percent have an incarcerated
parent, and 45 percent have been touched by an adult in a way that made them
feel uncomfortable,” Atkins explained. “Of the girls who are trafficked, 83
percent have run away from home, 90 percent are using alcohol and/or drugs, 27
percent self-injure, 24 percent attempt suicide and 20 percent are teen moms.
Eighty-four percent are or have been homeless, and one out of every three youth
on the streets are solicited within 48 hours; that was in 1999, and it’s
probably a lot higher now.”
Indeed, one of
the things that most amazes Atkins is how brazen the pimps are. “Even with me
there, people will come up to the young women I’m with,” she said. Most of the pimps are just trying to
make their money, and don’t know or care who else is involved.” Atkins
explained that 75 percent of the women she works with say they have a pimp,
“and it’s actually higher because some still call him their ‘boyfriend.’ … If
you see a young person with new nails, purses, clothes or hair, they’re
probably from a pimp or someone grooming them for ‘the life.’”
Helping these
young women out of “the life” is a tall order, Atkins acknowledged. It involves
coordination between a lot of authorities that usually don’t even speak
together very well, let alone work together. “The young women in STARS have consistent contact with law enforcement, social services,
nonprofit organizations and educational institutions,” Atkins said. “Somebody
has to fight for these people.”
Another problem
is breaking the hold the pimps have over their “girls,” Atkins explained.
“They’re either physically or psychologically controlled by the pimp,” she
said. “They’re so emotionally identified with them they won’t testify against
them. They’re trained to tell lies. Their experiences make them distrustful of
service providers and law enforcement. They’re moved around a lot so they don’t
get to create a center” — a permanent home or campsite where they might feel
secure enough to establish a sense of their own identity and self-worth.
Indeed, Atkins
displayed a circular “cycle” as part of the PowerPoint presentation that
accompanied her talk and compared it to the similar, but much better known,
“cycle” of domestic violence. Like battering husbands, pimps subject their
victims to “controlling and dominating relationships,” Atkins explained. “When
I first start to work with a woman, they’re on the phone all the time with
their pimp or with tricks. And they’re definitely not in control of their
money; if they try to keep their money, they’ll be beaten.”
Atkins grimly
listed the “barriers” facing these women in seeking help: “captivity,
confinement, isolation, use of violence, fear, shame, self-blame and
hopelessness.” Unless a police officer has been trained in how to deal with
teenage victims of sexual exploitation, Atkins explained, he’s likely to treat
them as criminals and arrest them for prostitution — and some unscrupulous cops
either demand “freebies” from them for not arresting them, or demand the
“freebies” and arrest them anyway. Once they’re convicted, they often serve
longer sentences than the pimps or the “johns” (their customers), a quirk in
the law Atkins wants to see changed.
And even women
who make it out of “the life” and back home face more troubles from both their
parents and their peers, Atkins explained. “You try to go back to your family
and your school, and people will call you ‘bitch’ and ‘ho’ at both home and
school,” she said.
Ironically,
Atkins cited National City as a local example of how victims of commercial sex
abuse of children should be treated. “We
went in and did meetings with police officers to train them,” she said. “We did
ride-alongs with the police. They would look for the johns or the pimps, and we
would reach out to the girls.” Another aspect of the program in National City
was training local business owners to spot victims and encourage both business
owners and residents to report hot-spots of sex trafficking.
According to the
San Diego Youth Services Web site, STARS is “a program designed for teen girls
between the ages of 13 and 17 who have experienced sexual exploitation and
prostitution. The goal is to empower young women to escape sexual
exploitation by developing their inner strengths, building a sense of community
and supporting their reintegration into mainstream society.” Among the services
offered are individual and groupo counseling, case management, community
referrals (including schools, health care, job placement and housing),
recreational activities, child care for teen mothers, and a “graduation
ceremony and certificate of completion” to give the women who complete the
12-week program a tangible sign of achievement.
The activists in
CFAC asked Atkins what they can do to help the girls in STARS, and in
particular what items they need donated. The answers were surprising. “They
really want to make some T-shirts and sell them to keep the survivors’ group
going,” Atkins said. Other things STARS members have asked for are help in
making professional-quality audio recordings so they can get their stories out,
art supplies so they can make “vision boards” expressing their feelings and
hope for lives outside “the life,” and one predictable item: independent living
skills.
“I measure
success in small ways,” Atkins said. “You show up to group, you use less, you
graduate from high school, you get into college, you haven’t talked to your
pimp in the last week, month or year. Some women get out of ‘the life’ and some
women are still in it but manage it more safely: they insist on condoms and
don’t go out high.”
Questions from the audience at CFAC ranged
from whether it would be possible to reach out to vulnerable people before they’re approached by pimps to teach them to avoid
the lures — maybe, Atkins said, but there’s no way to find out through her
program because there’s no funding available for prevention — to whether
legalizing sex work would help reduce the risks. No, said Atkins; the people
who want to legalize it usually assume it’s a career choice like any other, and
at least in her experience it isn’t because there’s nothing voluntary about it.
“All the people I have
encountered have been through traumas, and sex work was the result,” she
explained.
