Rethink Resources

The picture is from one of the news items of note this week. Here in Wisconsin, youth organized to protest a rule banning unaccompanied teens from a mall just inside of a suburb next to Milwaukee.

I want to point out that although I’m posting five news items that caught my eye in the week; I see so many more. Hundreds really that are directly about or related to issues impacting youth in the sex trade. It’s hard to select a few sometimes.

Although sometimes a report will spread like wildfire and you’ll see it reported over and over. That was the case with this item about a woman offering her 7 year old daughter to an undercover police officer so he could sexually abuse her for money.

In Missouri, more federal charges against men who pimped out a teen. And in Seattle a columnist points out that arrests and charges against youth for prostitution are increasing at the same time that funding for programs to help those at risk is decreasing.

Lastly a long article in the upcoming issue of New York Magazine details the experiences of a young teen who was pimped out. I hesitate to link to the article because I don’t really like it when news articles that barely, if at all, disguise the identity of young women report stories that don’t do justice to the wholeness of girls’ lives. I worry for her and having been the subject of news articles myself that never turn out the way you anticipate, I wonder what she’s thinking.

She testified to change the law a little while ago (and I happened to catch that story here as well). And I do like the contradiction the story ended on.

Robert J. Flores is the head of the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention at the Department of Justice. He is a former Manhattan A.D.A. who now administers the federal funds that fight the sex trafficking of minors in New York. “There’s a suggestion that this is a type of prostitution,” he says. “It’s not. It’s really the commercialized rape of our children.” Yet even he backs off from anything that looks like decriminalization. “We don’t want to see child prostitution legalized,” Flores continues. “The fact that this conduct remains illegal serves as a warning for everybody, including the teenagers, that they are doing something that’s wrong. But that does not equate with treating that child as an offender.”

Except, of course, that it does.

This week’s links:

Child Hookers and the Law: Tale of a 13 year old Prostitute. (New York) Monday April 2, 2007 The low-slung black car rolled to a stop on Rockaway Boulevard. Another car was already parked there, waiting in the dark. Behind the tinted windows of the first car, Lucilia, a beautiful half–Puerto Rican, half-Dominican girl from Flatbush with long dark hair, pale skin, and wide eyes, sat with the other girls and listened carefully to her instructions. “All you got to do is go up to the car in front of us…

Police: Mom offered undercover cop sex with 7-year-old daughter (Michigan) Monday April 2, 2007 A 33-year-old woman was jailed on a $1 million bond and her five children were in protective custody after she was charged with offering to let an undercover investigator take pornographic photos of one of the children and have sex with the 7-year-old.

Two men charged with forcing girl into prostitution for drugs (Missouri) Monday April 2, 2007 Two men accused of forcing a young girl into prostitution to repay a drug debt became on Friday the first to be indicted in federal court in St. Louis under a new child-sex-trafficking law.

Youth leaders protest Mayfair ID rule: Groups call for meeting to discuss alternative ways to keep mall safe (Wisconsin) Monday April 2, 2007 Leaders of three Milwaukee organizations that serve more than 1,000 mostly African-American teens say Mayfair Mall’s adult supervision policy, which went into effect Friday, will disproportionately affect central-city, minority youth.

Juvenile Injustice: County May Be Going After More Teen Prostitutes (Washington) Wednesday, March 28, 2007 The King County Prosecutor’s Office may be implementing a new strategy when it comes to teenage prostitutes. The typical sentence for teen prostitutes ranges from 0 to 30 days of incarceration. As the number of charges brought by King County has increased, with 22 in 2005 and 33 in 2006, King County appears to be pursuing harsher sentences.