From Ribbons and Dolls to Fish Nets and Johns

Hookers. Whores. Harlots. Wenches. Women of ill-repute. Prostitutes. There are many names and titles for women who sell their bodies for sex. Did you ever think "child" would be one of them? Most people don't. Even when we think of children being used for sex, we think sexual abuse and pedophiles, not solicitation and pimps. What about the phrase "human trafficking"? For most, the term brings to mind thoughts and images of foreigners, refuges, unfortunates being shipped in from around the world, gliding through the US borders under the cloak of the black market for sexual favors. It doesn't foster mental pictures of American teenage girls on the street corners of LA, New York, Nevada, and many more states working their territory as a villainous pimp lurks in the shadows nearby. But that is exactly what is going on in the US today, and has been for quite some time.

Many girls and boys in the US are being scooped up in the despicable world of solicitation by pimps and gang bangers just looking to make some quick money. And when I say girls and boys, I mean exactly that. At this time, the average age for entry into solicitation is 12, though children as young as 7 have been documented to have been sold for sex in the states. Girls are more prominent in the population than boys, but there are young boys being utilized on the streets as well. This blog, however, will address the females since most studies have focused on them and more information is readily available. How do these girls get picked up? Pimps practically soar above the dankest neighbors and cities like hawks, searching for prey, and have an eye for the "type".

Most girls who are easily manipulated and drawn into "the life" (as they call solicitation) are girls coming from broken or disturbed homes. Many struggle with self-esteem; they lack the attention and involvement they should be getting from their parents, lack a sense of safety and belonging. Many are runaways, and most have been sexually abused in the past, which automatically raises the risk for re-victimization. Being well-educated on their needs and short-comings, pimps ride in on their soiled horses, a knight in aluminum armor, ready to sweep these tragic children off their feet and persuade them with a fairy tale ending, which is of course nothing more than a fairy tale. Typically, a pimp finesses the child, sweet talks her, and makes her feel important, wanted. He might compliment her on her beauty, tell her she's special, make superficial promises. An introductory dialog might go like this: "Hey baby, you are looking so beautiful tonight, I can't believe you don't have a man looking out for you! You are gorgeous, you got it going on! Why don't you let me take care of you, baby? Let me take you out, I'll take you to nice places to eat, I'll buy you this dress, I'll get you some diamonds,you'll live in this great house, come on girl, get in the car!" While most of us know a pathetic game when we hear it, a 12 or 13 year old girl who has been emotionally neglected for the majority of her life and still suffers from the poor judgment all tweens have is overwhelmed by the positive attention, gushes and blushes and jumps in the car to start her new life. A life, a fantasy, which lasts a few weeks at best.

There is, at times, wining and dining and some flirting and "love". After a week or two, though, once the trust has been earned, the fairy tale shatters, and the dark nightmare begins. The pimp, who is done with the flowers and the threads, suddenly turns on the girl, tells her in short "girl, I'm a pimp, you're now my bitch, and you're gonna make me some money." Threats of harm follow to cement the reality of the situation. Of course, in that brief period of ecstasy that preceded this revelation, information has also been gathered on the girl's family and their addresses. So to secure the business deal, viable threats toward her family are made. The girl is coerced into sexual exploitation and she begins her fairy tale life of rape, violence, johns, pimps, and degradation.

A pimp usually has multiple girls in his pocket and one "head girl" ironically named the "bottom bitch." This girl is typically favored by the pimp, receives the most benefits, and is in charge of managing the other girls, as well as recruiting potential workers. They teach the new girls the ropes, show them how to draw in the customers, coach them on discerning between undercover police and legitimate johns, and most importantly, teach them about the life under their new "daddy." There are quotas to meet, rules to follow, expectations for behaviors, and severe consequences for any breach in guidelines or protocol. Missing a quota usually results in a beat down, refusal of food, shaving one's head, and walking home barefoot as the pimp drives behind them. Many girls have reported being run down and hit by the pimp's car, not hard enough to kill them, just enough to make a point. Sometimes it means compensating for the loss of money (a gang rape), or in one girl's case, being tied down naked to the bed and, like a revolving door, having one john after another come in and rape her, leaving the money with the pimp before each encounter. The girl was 13. If, on the other hand, the girl meets her quota, her rewards depend on the pimp. Some will give them a small percentage of the money earned. Some girls have reported earning a $1 cheeseburger at McDonald's if they meet their quota (most quotas are set to $700 and above every night). Some just avoid physical abuse and live to work another day.

The most effective weapon these pimps have to reign these girls in is psychological warfare. As previously mentioned, these street princes bait the girls with charming hollow promises and whispers of sweet nothings, then like a pumpkin carriage on the stroke of midnight, they transform into the menacing antagonist they are at heart. Threats of harm towards the girls and their families keep them in his pocket, too terrified to run and pursue freedom. It was once reported that a girl had attempted to run away from her pimp, but was caught. To set an example, the pimp gathered his other girls, took them all out to a field, and lined them up. He told the others "this is what happens when you try to leave me!" and shot the runaway in the head, leaving the others far too frightened to try a similar escape. But, at times, even when the looking glass has shattered and they see the reality before them, some girls cannot accept the truth. Suffering from trauma bonding, formally known as Stockholm Syndrome, these girls develop a sense of love and affection for their exploiters, who, in their eyes, can do no wrong. Many have deluded themselves into their own fabricated fairy tale, lamenting "he really does love me! He buys me clothes, and we sleep in the same apartment, he gives me some of the money I earn, he takes me out to nice dinners and he's a good daddy to our son!" They ignore the beatings, the fact that he has four other girlfriends, and that at the end of the day, if money is low, he will send them out to have sex with other men for more money.

The justice department is of course, not much help. Though many girls picked up by the police are underage, they are charged for solicitation and detained or placed on probation. Ironically, in the state of California, an individual under the age of 18 cannot consent to sex with someone over the age of 18. Under normal circumstances, if a 17 year old child is found having intercourse with an adult, the adult can be charged which sexual assault or statutory rape. If a 13 year old child prostitute is found having intercourse with an adult, the child is arrested, and the adult is giving a warning or a ticket. The child can spend up to a year in juvenile hall. The adult? An 8 hour course on illegal solicitation (this is the same consequence for receiving a traffic ticket). Other times, the police actually become johns, being educated on where these children work, they have no difficulty taking advantage of what they find to be favorable circumstances. A recent proposition was passed in California in the 2012 elections which would criminalize pimps and johns for seeking intercourse from minors, which passed overwhelmingly, however the prop was placed on hold after a judge deemed the language of the bill "too ambiguous to protect the rights of the accused." And these girls are once again victimized by people who were expected to protect them.

It is has become a dark world when a child cannot walk home from school alone because pimps are recruiting on the street corners. I have begun working with many of these clients; it is tragic when 20% of my clients have been approached by pimps, and another 20% have worked for one at some point and time, if they aren't still. Child Sex Trafficking is made up of a population with many titles which are constantly changing to provide the most accurate perception, from Sexually Exploited Minors (SEM), to Commercially Sexually Exploited Children (CSEC), and now Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) to reiterate that we are not talking about foreign refuges and unfortunates. Many cases are hard to swallow, many break my heart, and some have traumatized me. But this is a problem that has flown under the radar for so long it can never begin to be resolved if it continues. If awareness cannot be bred, these children cannot be saved.

For more information on domestic child trafficking, visit these sites:
http://www.misssey.org/
http://www.gems-girls.org/

And you can watch the informative documentation, Very Young Girls on YouTube Here:
Part One:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycgaPw38fkc

Part Two:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7I54dPNQqk

Part Three:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gEbqPRnBEI

Children Who Kill, and Those Who Don't

Twelve years ago today, a small town in Colorado became temporarily notorious. Mention it's name out of context and many won't be able to place where Littleton is, let alone why it is infamous to begin with. But, on April 20th, 1999, no one could think of anywhere else after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold glided onto the Columbine campus armed with semi-automatic guns and several home-made bombs that were strategically placed in the building. After just a few short hours, with both boys dead from self-inflicted wounds, they had succeeded in killing thirteen innocent people, and injuring twenty one others.

After this tragic incident, accusations were flying everywhere, everyone searching for something or someone to blame, and most people getting it wrong. From the goth culture to heavy metal music, from video games to psychotropic meds, the media hit each and every viable possibility and shoved it down the general public's throat, simultaneously demonizing the shooters and society as a whole. The one point of focus that probably carried the most merit faded into the background: school bullying. Social outcasts who were ridiculed every day, humiliated and hassled, labeled with homophobic slurs, they eventually reached their breaking points, as many in their positions do.

In reading the book Children Who Kill by Carol Anne Davis, I've come across many similar stories of seemingly sadistic cold-blooded murderers who, in a moment of rage or in simple remorseless apathy have killed innocent people. Some stories are unnerving, others, stomach-churning, but they all had similarities too prominent to ignore: child abuse, neglect, instability, social ostracization, and psychological illness. And much like the Columbine shooters, the media turned to other factors such as games, TV shows, movies, and just hanging with bad crowds as probable causes of the violence. In nearly every story, a blind eye was turned to the long term ill-effects that come with years of pain, suffering, and devastation these children experienced, typically inflicted by the very people who were meant to protect them.

Now over the past months of blogging, my own personal history has gradually been revealed as my blogs have taken a more intimate tone, and many of you are aware of several instances of abuse, various types from various perpetrators, school bullying, and my own resulting mood disorders. What has tapped into my being and struck a chord with me while reading about these kids is how easily I could have become one of them. With very similar backgrounds and long repertoires of emotionally and psychologically altering circumstances, what is that defining factor that sets one apart? What makes some of us killers and others productive members of society?

In Viktor Frankl's autobiography, Man's Search for Meaning, he discusses his own experiences with the continuing battle between Saints and Swine while serving time in a concentration camp during WW2. A prominent point Frankl made repeatedly in his book was the issue of freedom of choice. He argued that although events take place in our lives and we cannot always control what happens to us, what is in our control is how we respond to these events: we become saints, or we become swine. In his example, saints were defined as individuals who cared for fellow prisoners and looked out for one another, and the swine were individuals who adopted a more "every man for himself" approach to surviving the camps. In our lives, this can be more or less the individuals who go on to lead generally successful lives, have families and meaningful relationships, maintain employment and housing, and individuals who fall into more self-destructive and criminal behaviors and end up harming themselves or others.

I frequently utilized Frankl's theory in working with severely emotionally disturbed teens. Sadly, like the kids in Davis' book, most of them had seen the worst of life in the few years they had lived. Many survived neglect at the hands of their drug-abusing mothers, many suffered beneath the iron fist of alcoholic fathers who used them as punching bags. Some had been forced into early sexual awareness by perverted family members. All of these matters were events in their lives they couldn't control, so in a misguided effort to regain that control, they began engaging in their own destructive behaviors: truancy, theft, drug use, promiscuity, self-mutilation, even suicide attempts. In trying to redirect that sense of control into more productive actions, many of such teens can be molded into functioning healthy individuals, in spite of their dark pasts.

Unfortunately, for many of these kids who went on to commit these heinous crimes, intervention was too little too late, if it came at all. For some, any intervention may have proved useless, as the damage had been done and psychopathology had set in, rendering them sociopaths. However, for the most part, it seems that rehabilitation is more than possible, if we can find the missing link that sets us on the right path. Granted, many of the child killers were male and in the midst or on the brink of puberty. With the increased level of testosterone and the effect it has on aggression, it could be argued that hormones play a part. Other factors could be time and type of interventions, variations in abuse and abusers, genetics, etc. In short, I have no idea what makes some people killers and what makes some successful survivors. I don't know why I took the path I did and narrowly avoided becoming a statistic. I had the background, I had the resulting depression, I was a self-mutilator, I had deep-seated anger, a seething hatred for the people who hurt me and resentment and distrust of people in general. My intervention was therapy and medication, and eventually the depression, anger, and hate dissipated and I became a therapist to help others. Some are just not as lucky, I suppose.

Eric and Dylan were two of the unfortunates. Though not much has been written on their home life, I would imagine they were not stable situations with overly concerned and involved parents, as anyone could have seen this train wreck coming had they only paid attention. After Columbine, they were destroyed by the media as crazed psychotic killers who master-minded elaborate plans of attacks, plans which, if read with an impartial eye, come off more as the childish, nonsensical grandiose ideas of manic kids than highly intellectual criminals. Few even addressed what was probably a dark, lonely adolescence for two severely depressed young men. The same happened to Seung-Hu Cho of Virginia Tech, a long-disturbed child also destroyed by the media when "violent" short stories he had written were sensationalized as red flags. In reality, they were poorly written blips about angry high school students cursing their principal.

Criminals are not born, they're made. While some of us can be saved, many many more fall through the cracks, and soon make headlines. So before we allow the media to strip these poor kids of their humanity, let us not forget that at one point, these "cold-hearted murderers" were once someone's baby, and more than likely, that baby was not given much love.